Olympus Prime’s slick call-centre operation in Belgrade shows how a highly choreographed “education” pitch aims to lure everyday investors into fake crypto and trading schemes, but this quest for rapid global growth seems to depend on exploiting regulatory blind spots and vulnerable people at scale.
Right now, investment fraud sits at the top of Australia’s scam losses, with the National Anti-Scam Centre recording close to $160 million lost in a single year. Investigators say much of that money is siphoned off by a surprisingly small group of sophisticated operators who recycle brands, websites and corporate structures whenever one scheme starts to unravel.
When Serbian police raided the Olympus Prime office in early 2023, backed by Europol and German intelligence, they found what looked less like a scrappy hustle and more like a factory, with training videos, scripts and hard drives detailing a boiler-room system that used English-speaking aliases, fake brokerages and glossy crypto platforms to sell fantasy-level returns, then disappeared as soon as customers tried to withdraw their cash. Buried inside was a client database of more than 100,000 victims worldwide, including 37,925 Australians whose details later helped reporters and investigators piece together the links between offshore call centres, European shell firms and Australian-registered companies.
Those records, together with court files and corporate registries, point to an industrialised playbook. Dozens of nearly identical investment “brands” were pushed out of the same Belgrade floors, with five language-based teams such as the German-focused “Panzer” crew working rotating shifts to hit hot and cold leads. Agents were told to westernise their names, claim they were calling from places like Melbourne or London, lean heavily on Australian business numbers and financial licences as proof of safety and keep pressing clients to top up their accounts, often via crypto exchanges such as CoinsHype or House of Bits, until the customer’s savings, personal loans or superannuation were gone. Internal chats later revealed that some of these staff, who could earn more than €60,000 in monthly bonuses on top of local average wages of about €700, viewed clients as targets rather than customers and stopped contact the moment accounts were emptied.
Pulling the camera back, the picture looks like a “rinse and repeat” production line more than a run of isolated scams. Once a particular brand such as Ozifin Tech, PrimeOT or Wingroup is exposed, liquidated or hit with a penalty, Ozifin and two related firms were fined $75 million in 2020 for systemic unconscionable conduct, the same core network seems to spin up fresh entities, route payments through new crypto exchanges and recruit local straw directors to front ASIC-registered companies that give overseas masterminds legal distance and a veneer of legitimacy. Regulators in Australia, Europe and Israel appear to be playing catch-up across borders and asset classes, slowed by rules that require matching offences in multiple countries, geopolitical priorities and a corporate registry system that still struggles to follow individuals who use slight name changes and multiple addresses.
Australian authorities have started to push back. One local director connected to Oved-linked entities has pleaded guilty to dealing with suspected scam proceeds through an Australian crypto business, facing a maximum of one year in prison and a fine of about $12,600, but those penalties look small beside the average $82,170 lost per victim in the seized Olympus Prime database or the billions frozen when larger crypto platforms imploded. Experts argue that unless company-director identification rules, cross-border evidence sharing and crypto oversight tighten considerably, the same small circle of organisers can keep burning through brands, swapping out websites and call-centre scripts and using the ASIC logo and Australian registrations as their most persuasive marketing tool while ordinary investors bear the cost.
