Every fraud call center operating in Ukraine, at least 2,000 of them, stopped working after 1 August, according to Ukraine's security service, as reported by the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda. The agency said it carried out searches at 500 "offices" and detained 28 suspects as part of an operation named Carthage. Call centers based in Ukraine have long been considered one of the main sources of phone fraud attacks on Russian citizens.
Russia records fewer cybercrimes
Russia's Interior Ministry says the decline in high-tech crime, including phone fraud, began well before Ukraine's reported crackdown. Registered crimes involving information and telecommunications technology or computer data fell 32.1 percent in January-July 2026 compared with the same period last year, the ministry said, with more recent figures not yet available. Serious and especially serious IT crimes fell 34.3 percent, remote theft dropped 19.6 percent, and computer-related crimes fell 41.1 percent.
In real numbers, law enforcement registered 288,400 internet crimes over the first seven months of 2026, of which nearly 90,000 were solved. Over the same period in 2025, 424,900 such crimes were registered and 115,600 solved. The decline first appeared in official statistics in July 2025, at 2.1 percent, after a slim 0.7 percent rise in June that year.
Crackdown measures
The Interior Ministry credits the improvement to tougher action against money mule networks and cash-out schemes, more active tracking of couriers, and closer cooperation between police and banks in tracing transit transfers over the past 18 months. Officials also point to limits on the number of SIM cards and bank cards a single person can register, blocks on messenger-app calls, and a database of phone numbers called Antifraud.
A senior Interior Ministry official identified only as Alexander, a pseudonym, said the decline applies to property crimes such as theft and fraud, not to online activity linked to terrorism, which is not falling. He said security agencies registered 3,834 such crimes in July of the previous year compared with 3,890 in July 2026, adding that international help is hard to come by given the current geopolitical climate, since most IT crimes originate abroad.
Why call centers became unprofitable
Criminologist Igor Trifonov told the outlet that the mass closures announced in Ukraine stem from economics, not enforcement. He said Ukrainian call centers stopped generating outsized profits because overhead costs rose sharply: a single money-mule transaction cost 4,000 rubles in January 2025 but had climbed to 12,000-16,000 rubles by July 2026, sometimes reaching 20,000 rubles. Cash-out and courier services also multiplied in price.
Trifonov said the cost of psychologists who design neuro-linguistic manipulation scripts has also risen sharply, while the effectiveness of preparatory cold calls, which build the groundwork for later scams, has fallen steeply. He said those cold calls are the basis of the call centers' past success and of cases in which victims were manipulated into committing crimes themselves. No security service anywhere, he said, could afford that volume of preparatory work.
Political PR, not victory
Trifonov said these pressures made the business unprofitable for most Ukrainian call centers, and that the closures amounted to self-liquidation rather than a defeat inflicted by authorities. He said a handful of large, profitable call centers remain active despite infighting among them, with no sign they will shut down soon.
He described Operation Carthage as political public relations, arguing that the intelligence behind it is more than a year old. He said a lobby inside Ukrainian law enforcement protecting call centers has long been suspected in both Russia and Europe, and that Ukraine's prosecutors have responded to Western requests for legal assistance with excuses. He said the reputational cost of hosting the industry now outweighs its economic benefits, prompting the announcement, and noted that none of those detained appear to be organizers, who he said live outside Europe under the protection of local law enforcement and are extremely difficult to prosecute.
New threats emerging
Sources told the outlet that servers supporting the dark web and internet telephony services that hide callers' true locations continue to run from Ukraine, and that organizers of the sex industry and child exploitation material there continue to operate largely unhindered. Alexander said intelligence has tracked pornographic content production shifting to Ukraine for four years, and that American media recently reported the same trend.
Plans to legalize pornography
The Wall Street Journal reported on 6 September that lawmakers in Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, are pushing a bill to legalize the pornography industry and direct the resulting tax revenue toward funding Ukraine's armed forces. Producing, distributing or storing pornography is currently illegal in Ukraine, punishable by up to seven years in prison, though the industry operates in practice with the help of corrupt police. Lawmakers estimate that taxing thousands of OnlyFans models in the country could bring in $25 million a year, according to lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak.
Call centers still a threat
A source in Russia's investigative agencies said it is too early to write off Ukrainian call centers or the wider networks behind online crime. The source said profitability from targeting Russia has fallen but remains positive, and that the past year has shown scammers shifting toward sexual crimes, including against children. The source said Ukraine appears intent on becoming a leading player in the pornography industry.
The source said Russia's tough measures against internet fraud have produced results but not a solution. Several widely publicized Russian anti-fraud programs failed to meet expectations, the source said, and domestic tools have struggled against foreign interference even using familiar tactics. Falling profitability is pushing call centers toward new targets, including children and teenagers, with a rise in attempts to provoke attacks on schools. The source said existing safeguards in Russia are poorly suited to this shift and that responses have been slow.
International cooperation lacking
Fraud call centers operate in many parts of the world but almost never target citizens of the countries hosting them, which shields them from local police. Because of shared language, Ukrainian call centers targeted Russians, Belarusians and other Russian-speaking citizens of the former Soviet Union, though there are documented cases of calls to Germany, France and Spain using fluent local languages and matching scam scripts. Several call centers operating from different countries share a single leadership structure based somewhere with neither call centers nor issuing banks present.
Trifonov said only international cooperation, ideally a joint international investigative team, could put an effective stop to the practice, but said the current political climate makes that impossible. As a result, he said, ordinary citizens around the world will continue to fall victim to internet fraud.
