Ukraine has become a European hub for multimillion dollar online scamming call centres. The attempted murder of Ukrainian businessman Vadym Iermolaiev in Monaco on June 28 is likely to be connected to his illegal call centre operations based in his home town of Dnipro in Ukraine, say experts, beyond the reach of EU police or courts. The call centres target consumers in the EU and Russia and generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The bombing is the first of its kind in Monaco’s history, but the chief prosecutor quickly ruled out a terrorist attack. "This attack cannot be classified as terrorism," adding that a single suspect was the focus of the investigation. The suspect was tracked on surveillance cameras leaving the device at the entrance to a residential complex before crossing into neighbouring France. As of July 1, midday, there had been no arrest.

The attack injured seven people including Iermolaiev, his wife and his 13-year-old son. His partner is in life-threatening condition, having sustained serious injuries to her lower body, with Ukrainska Pravda reporting she has lost both her legs. Monaco's investigators have not officially named Iermolaiev as the target, identified a motive, or linked the attack to organised crime. Multiple competing theories have been advanced publicly, none accompanied by supporting evidence.

Iermolaiev’s business interests

Iermolaiev built his fortune through the Alef industrial and commercial group, becoming one of Dnipro's largest property developers, but since then he has additionally set up a string of large call centres where operators try to trick innocent punters into making payments or fraudulently steal their bank and credit card data.

Forbes Ukraine estimated his net worth at around $220mn in 2021. He renounced his Ukrainian citizenship in 2019, explaining to Forbes in 2024: "The Ukrainian judicial system, to put it mildly, is not ideal, and the tax system is not objective." But the dysfunctional rule of law is ideal for running call centres attempting to scam people out of their savings. While no investigation appears to have ever been launched into Iermolaiev's business, it has reportedly been flourishing.

In late 2023, Iermolaiev was personally sanctioned by the Ukrainian government for involvement with the Russian government and maintaining an alcoholic beverage company in Russian-annexed Crimea.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time that the sanctions had been directed against “those who aid Russia's aggression, those who assist it, and those who have chosen the disgraceful path of collaborating with the terrorist state.”

The oligarch denies these claims and has since transferred many of his assets to his daughter, Sofia Kononenko, according to an investigation by Glavcom, a Ukrainian news site.

Iermolaiev was formerly chairman of the supervisory board of Versobank, a small Estonian lender whose licence was revoked by the European Central Bank in 2018 for violating anti-money laundering rules. His elder son Artur was also a board member during the same period, an Eesti Ekspress investigation established.

Ukrainska Pravda, citing law enforcement sources, reported that French investigators believe the Monaco attack followed a breakdown in a territory-sharing arrangement and unpaid debts between Iermolaiev and organised crime figures in Dnipro. Monaco's investigators have confirmed none of this.

Son arrest for call centre scams

The most likely motive for the bombing is connected to Iermolaiev’s son Arthur. In a rare success for law enforcement cracking down on cybercrime, Artur was arrested in Cyprus by Interpol on December 4, 2025, attempting to board a plane headed for Dubai.

He was extradited to Estonia where he was found guilty of heading a scam centre which had swindled over €100mn from its victims, confirming the Iermolaiev family’s control over numerous illegal scam call centres.

However, in a surprise decision, he was granted a plea bargain in April 2026, receiving only €8.5mn as a fine, a suspended five-year sentence and a 10-year Schengen ban.

Experts speculate that as part of Arthur’s deal, he agreed to turn informant and give up names of other people working in the scam call centre business, which has provoked a gangland style retribution.

"It's much more likely that it was connected to the scam call centres, and most likely to his son. Artur appears to have struck a deal with the investigators and likely gave up his accomplices and the other beneficiaries of the call centre network involved in criminal activity. In the end, this appears to have been retaliation,” political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told the Kyiv Independent.

Fast growth of the scamming industry

Scam activity across Europe is escalating dramatically, nearly doubling over the past year, according to Europol. The owners of call centres are constantly developing new strategies that are becoming increasingly sophisticated, seeking vulnerabilities and playing on the egos of con victims.

Romance scams, which play on the idea of online dating, have been doubling annually since 2023. The advent of AI has taken things to a new level with voice scams where AI mimics the voice of someone the victim knows are also doubling. Alternatively, the fraudsters impersonate police or bank staff in their efforts to steal financial data, according to an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

One consumer survey estimated that Europeans lost $57bn to scams in the last year alone, with only about 3% of victims reporting the crime to authorities. Losses in the banking system are clearer: payment fraud across the European Economic Area reached €4.2bn in 2024, up from €3.5bn in 2023. Credit-transfer fraud alone was €2.2bn, up 16% y/y, with payment users bearing about 85% of those losses, largely because of scams that trick people into authorising transfers. In the UK, authorised push payment fraud losses rose 12% in 2025, reversing a recent downward trend.

Specifically, call centres are only one channel within the broader online fraud business. Europol estimates scam calls cause around €850mn in losses worldwide each year, which would make Arthur Iermolaiev a significant player if the Estonian claim that he swindled victims out of €100mn. But call centres remain a fraction of the total since much fraud now runs through online platforms and fake investment sites rather than phone calls, says OCCRP.

War-torn Ukraine has nonetheless become a significant hub for call-centre fraud targeting Europeans and Russians who have also lost an estimated $2bn last year, according to German Gref, Chairman of Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.

In December 2025, a Eurojust-coordinated operation dismantled a network running professional call centres in Kyiv, Dnipro and Ivano-Frankivsk that defrauded hundreds of victims of more than $11.7mn. An action day on December 9 produced 72 searches across the three cities, 12 arrests and 45 identified suspects; police seized forged police and bank IDs, cash, 21 vehicles, weapons and even a polygraph machine, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Around 100 people worked in the operation, recruited from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere, earning up to 7% commission on what they extorted, with promised bonuses of cash, cars or a Kyiv apartment for top earners. Tactics included posing as police to withdraw money using victims' card details, or claiming accounts had been hacked and persuading victims to move funds to safe accounts, sometimes via remote-access software.

Ironically, the war in Ukraine has provided cover for these call centres. Dnipro, in the eastern half of the country, has come under direct fire from Russian forces. Czech detectives say it has become more common to move call centres closer to the frontline, where they are less likely to be targeted by law-enforcement operations, The Record reported. A separate December bust in Kyiv, run in coordination with Ukraine's Security Service, the SBU, hit a fake-investment operation led by a 31-year-old from the Donetsk region, causing nearly $2mn in losses to at least 138 known victims.

The violence the industry generates is not confined to Monaco. In February 2026, Igor Komarov, a 28-year-old Ukrainian national identified by Ukrainian media as an admitted operator of Dnipro-based call-centre networks since 2021, was kidnapped on the Indonesian island of Bali. His dismembered body was found on a beach in Gianyar on February 26. Bali police confirmed identification through DNA testing on March 4 and named seven foreign suspects, four of whom had already left Indonesia. In video footage that circulated before his death, Komarov described a dispute over criminal proceeds as the trigger for his abduction.

Ukraine’s crackdown

Ukrainian authorities started to target domestic call-centre networks defrauding EU citizens in 2022 at the start of the war with Russia. The scale of what they were dealing with became clearer in March 2025, when OCCRP and more than 30 media partners, including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and The Guardian, published Scam Empire, an investigation based on a leak of nearly two terabytes of internal data from two major scam operations, including more than 20,000 hours of recorded calls, screen recordings and internal spreadsheets.

The investigation found that those two networks alone took in around $275mn from at least 32,000 people over roughly four years. The report described Dnipro in particular as a centre of the trade, with a Wolf of Wall Street-style office culture and young recruits hired openly through job sites. Former Interpol secretary general Jürgen Stock told OCCRP that "the laptop, so to speak, is now the sharpest sword in the arsenal of criminal groups." Nino Goldbeck, senior cybercrime prosecutor in Bavaria, told the investigation that "these call centres are extremely professionally structured and organized and are managed accordingly."

Up to 1,500 fraudulent call centres were operating in Ukraine as recently as 2024, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, many of them concentrated in Dnipro and its surroundings.

As part of Ukraine's EU accession bid it is required to crack down on corruption, and the authorities have been working to curb cybercrime operations in the country. Negotiations on the first cluster have just been opened, which deal with the “Fundamental” package of reforms that include the judiciary, law enforcement and anti-corruption measures, where Ukraine is lagging behind.

Scamming has also become an unofficial weapon and another front in Ukraine’s economic war with Russia. In December 2024, Vladimir Putin told his annual press conference that Ukrainian phone scammers had stolen more than RUB250bn ($2.5bn) from Russian citizens that year alone, and accused Kyiv of making phone fraud "state policy," the Moscow Times reported.

What is separately documented is the way the war has reshaped the operating environment. The Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime found that some call-centre operators frame their work explicitly as economic warfare against Russia, with job advertisements asking recruits whether they want to help undermine the Russian economy. Proceeds, the same report found, rarely re-enter the Ukrainian economy, moving instead into offshore accounts or cryptocurrency.

This creates an uncomfortable calculation for Ukrainian authorities. Eurojust operations demonstrate that Ukrainian law enforcement is capable of acting and has done so. But in a country fighting for survival, with law enforcement resources stretched and its economy contracting, the political appetite to shut down an industry generating billions, even a criminal one, has limits that investigators and policymakers have not publicly discussed.

What is not in dispute is the outline the Monaco bomb has made visible: a sanctioned oligarch from Dnipro, a son convicted of running a €100mn fraud network who served four months before paying his way to freedom, and a city that functions as the acknowledged capital of European telephone fraud, shielded in part by a war that has made it harder to police and easier to justify.