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On a server in a data center in the German city of Gunzenhausen, the Swedish police have obtained extensive material that can prove how bitcoin scammers misled Swedish retirees in Kiev, as DN revealed earlier this year.
The Swedish retirees were deceived by everything they owned and also by the scammers of the company Milton Group, which on an industrial scale with hundreds of telemarketers sold fake investments in, among other things, bitcoin.
Disguised image from inside the Milton Group office in Kiev.
The server contains the Milton Group phone system, which automatically logs and records salespeople’s conversations with victims.
– These are several hard drives, so now investigators have to work with them and look for relevant information, says chamber prosecutor Arne Fors of the National Unit against Organized and International Crime.
The server could be protected after the Swedish authorities sent a request to Germany.
It is not yet clear exactly what information is on the material, but the request dates back 12 months. In theory, conversations with many of the Swedish victims, which DN wrote about, can be saved.
According to Arne Fors, the request to freeze the telephony server was made on March 3. Two days after DN’s reveal.
The DN review was conducted with the help of a whistleblower within the criminal organization. Alexeij worked in the sales organization and collected information that he gradually sent to DN over the course of several months.
Among other things, it took data from the Milton Group’s sales and customer management system, where data was collected on all victims. Name, phone number, which vendor was last contacted, and what amounts were paid. Everything was carefully documented in the modern computer system. Comments on individual victims were also entered.
“He sold his house to pay, penniless, crying,” they wrote about “MajBritt” from Dalarna, who was one of the Swedish victims who told DN how they were scammed.
Pensioner Maj-Britt, 67, lost everything she had and was in debt for life.
Photo: Alexander Mahmoud
He lost everything he owned and went into debt for life. Although he sold his house to pay, he still has a loan of 800,000 SEK.
In January this year, Alexei left Ukraine. For a time, Dagens Nyheter provided him with sheltered housing and in February he was in Stockholm and handed over all his equipment to the Swedish police.
The material contained the information about the two servers.
Since then, he has been questioned several times and has given detailed testimony to investigators. Tasks that have also been shared with the European Police Organization Europol.
But the server with the customer database, however, it has been lost, according to Arne Fors.
If they had taken over the server, it could have provided important information not only about the Swedish victims, but also about thousands of people around the world.
– It was probably the server I most expected, says Arne Fors.
The request for that server was made only in June, more than three months after they received information about it.
– There were slightly different offers on what the server was somewhere, whether in Germany or the US And it was not clear where to direct your request, says Arne Fors.
But according to the prosecutor, the delay should not have affected the result.
– Regarding the other server where we think there would be a customer database. There is no content associated with that IP address. And that’s because they have used dynamic IP addresses, so they constantly change. At that IP address, there was no information that was interesting for the investigation. That is the response we have received from Germany, he says.
According to the complainant Alexei data used staff Skype and Amazon emails to communicate internally, among other things, directives were sent on how money transactions should be conducted in this way.
The material he has collected and handed over to the police contains the addresses and accounts of around 70 key Milton Group personnel.
However, the police have not even begun to review these accounts.
– It is not something we have had time for, or it is not something the investigator has had time to deal with, but Skype accounts, from what I understand, could perhaps be traced. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten that far, says Arne Fors.
Whistleblower Alexei’s information was shared by Dagens Nyheter with the non-profit journalists’ organization Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and with about 20 newspapers around the world. The material contained information on 1,000 victims from 50 countries.
The Swedish police investigation into the fraud contains 19 victims, who were identified on the basis of Alexei’s material. Alexei now lives with a protected address within the EU.
