Five individuals have been arrested by the Australian police for leading a scam call center and targeting the local population.
The group consists of three men and two women who managed to defraud Australians of more than $1.8 million over the course of two years.
The scammers used the age-old cold calling tactic where they would ring up unsuspecting victims and offer them a platform to generate profits through cryptocurrency trades.
The group was operating a website with a trading dashboard so that investors could “check” their profits as they were registering. Naturally, though, none of those “profits” were withdrawable.
The cold-call scam is a recurring theme all over the world where people simply buy leads from shady dealers and try to convince them over the phone to deposit quite significant amounts on their platform. Naturally, the conversion rate was very low, but the fact that there was a conversion rate already classifies as a crime according to Australian standards.
Crypto scams and tax evasion in Australia has been on the rise for more than a year now and authorities are starting to pay a lot more attention. It’s likely that cases like these will surface again in the future as police find more fraudsters.
