In a major coordinated law enforcement operation targeting cross-border financial crime, Turkish security forces have taken down an elaborate organized fraud network with alleged ties to Israeli principals that scammed victims across three continents out of at least $266 million over two years, Turkish Justice Minister Akin Gurlek announced Friday.
The multi-agency investigation, carried out in partnership with Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and Interpol, uncovered 42 fraudulent call centers operated under the cover of 28 fake corporate entities, with 239 suspects currently identified as persons of interest in the case. Dawn raids were executed simultaneously across 236 locations in two major Turkish regions, Istanbul and Mugla, to disrupt the network’s operations.
According to Gurlek, investigators confirmed that individuals with documented links to Israel served as the primary owners and final beneficiaries of all the front companies involved in the scheme. Turkish law enforcement officials have connected this bust to the notorious transnational criminal syndicate widely referred to as the “Scam Empire”, a network that has operated across dozens of countries for more than a decade. The criminal group was first brought to widespread public attention in an expose by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which previously detailed how scam rings based out of Israel and European countries stole hundreds of millions from defrauded investors via deceptive telephone-based investment schemes.
The mechanics of the fraud follow a well-worn but effective pattern documented by investigators. The network hired multilingual customer service agents to lure victims from target regions into fraudulent foreign exchange investment schemes. Once victims signed up, they were granted access to controlled, fake investment platforms that displayed artificially inflated fabricated profits. This deceptive display convinced victims to deposit increasingly large sums of money, which was immediately siphoned off by the organizers. All stolen funds were quickly transferred out of Turkey to offshore bank accounts and untraceable cryptocurrency wallets, officials confirmed. Individual victims lost anywhere from $10,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars each, according to current victim statements and evidence collected during the raids.
One of the key alleged masterminds of the Turkish operation, identified only by the initials YA, is an Israeli national who also holds Portuguese citizenship, Turkish investigators confirmed. This bust is not the first high-profile case of Israeli-linked investment fraud targeting global victims: in 2016, Reuters exposed a similar scheme run by Israeli trading firm NRGbinary, which stole millions of dollars from European investors before Israeli authorities shut the company down later that year. In a 2025 follow-up investigation, OCCRP mapped out two similar scam call center networks operating out of Israel, Eastern Europe and Georgia that persuaded more than 32,000 global victims to invest a combined total of at least $275 million.
Investigators familiar with the current Turkish probe say the network mirrored operational structures documented in the earlier OCCRP investigation. Call center agents were required to use entirely false identities and forged supporting documents to build trust with victims. Against a backdrop of escalating diplomatic tensions between Turkey and Israel in recent years, Turkish security officials assess that Israel-based scam networks have actively shifted a portion of their operational infrastructure to Turkey to avoid detection by domestic law enforcement in their home country.
To avoid being traced, organizers set up empty shell companies that serve as front operations for the scam call centers, then hire local staff fluent in a wide range of target market languages, including Japanese, Hindi, French and Spanish. Employees are hired under specific roles labeled “conversion agents” and “retention agents”, each with a clear function in luring and manipulating victims. All new recruits undergo a one-week training program where they are assigned fake aliases and coached to build entirely false personal backstories designed to impress victims and build false credibility, including common claims that the agent is an elite graduate of Oxford University or another top international institution.
To protect the network from infiltration, organizers require all new hires to pass a polygraph test before starting work, designed to uncover any hidden connections to law enforcement or security agencies. Strict internal rules govern day-to-day operations: speaking Hebrew inside call center facilities is completely banned, and agents never identify the actual shell company they work for. Instead, they pose as representatives of fake investment platforms whose names are changed on a rotating basis by the Israeli organizers to evade tracking. One of the most strictly enforced rules, investigators found, is that the network never targets Israeli citizens for scams, limiting all fraudulent activity to victims outside of Israel.
In their assessment of the network’s structure, Turkish investigators found that transnational scam networks operated by Israeli fraudsters have cultivated what the syndicate describes as a mutually beneficial, “win-win” relationship with the state of Israel, though no further evidence or details of this relationship were provided in the official announcement.