Ukraine's scam call-centre industry generates as much as $1bn a month, according to a new report by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), which estimates that around 60,000 Ukrainians — roughly two-thirds the headcount of the country's legal banking sector — now work in the trade.

The estimate, part of a three-part GI-TOC research collection published in April, is the most granular public accounting yet of an industry IntelliNews has already flagged as a European fraud hub. GI-TOC's Ukraine case study finds scam centres now operating in all 24 of the country's oblasts, including Russian-occupied territory, run largely in plain sight.

“The good thing is that people are getting smarter and don’t get duped as easily,” an MP who sat on a parliamentary commission investigating the industry told GI-TOC researchers — though the watchdog cautions that a recent dip in complaints may reflect rising public awareness as much as any real fall in the industry's size.

GI-TOC's revenue estimate is built up from source interviews: a medium-sized ‘office’ makes about $1mn a month and a large one up to $3mn, according to the MP on the commission. Assuming the average office is medium-sized and around 1,000 centres remain active after a 2023 crackdown, that implies potential market revenue of roughly $1bn a month — though overheads are considerable and most of the profit goes to the bosses running the operations, GI-TOC notes, not the low-level scammers doing the calling.

The industry is highly consolidated: just three networks reportedly control most of Ukraine's scam centres, with significant involvement from established organised-crime groups and, GI-TOC says, protection from law enforcement that lets shut-down operations reopen with little disruption.

Dnipro and Kyiv remain the epicentres — an estimated 30,000 people were reportedly working in scam 'offices' in Dnipro alone as of late 2024 — but the industry has spread to Odesa, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Transcarpathia and Lviv as organised crime migrated away from front-line areas of eastern Ukraine after the 2022 invasion. A crackdown ordered by prosecutor general Ruslan Kravchenko, who took office in June 2025, shut 25 call centres in Dnipro alone the following month, with dozens more closures since; in December, Ukrainian and European law enforcement jointly dismantled a network spanning Kyiv, Dnipro and Ivano-Frankivsk that had defrauded 47 Europeans of almost €1mn.

Ukraine, Russia and Georgia are the region's scam-centre hotspots, a companion GI-TOC report on Eurasia finds, with Europe and North America the main targets. Belarus shows the highest exposure to fraudulent activity by one measure, and Russia is the main target within the region itself; Armenia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are less active currently but show signs of catching up. The report ties the regional picture directly to the war: Russia's invasion has widened the pool of potential recruits and victims and gutted what little law-enforcement cooperation existed between Moscow and the West, letting criminal networks exploit the resulting divide.

As IntelliNews reported, a Georgian journalist was charged with fraud over a multi-language call-centre scheme in February, and Kazakhstan intercepted 84.5mn fraudulent phone calls in 2025 alone, shutting 13 call centres in the process.

GI-TOC's bigger warning is about what comes next: artificial intelligence and ‘crime-as-a-service’ tools could soon put a working scam operation within reach of anyone with “a few thousand dollars”, not just the large, capitalised networks that dominate the trade today — a shift the report says could cause “an exponential increase” in the number of scammers and scams, “with geography, time and language no barrier”.