On April 17, Albanian and Austrian police walked into three call centers in Tirana and pulled the plug on a €50M crypto investment fraud. The room they found is the room every victim was already inside without knowing it.
Between June 2023 and April 2026, a network of call centers in Albania's capital city pulled at least €50 million (about $56M USD) out of ordinary people across Europe and beyond, using fake investment platforms, celebrity faces, and a staff of 400 whose job title was "retention agent" but whose actual function was something else entirely. Europol announced the bust on April 29, 2026. The machine had been running for years before anyone outside it knew what to call it.