UK prosecutors have charged a 43-year-old Peterborough woman and a 54-year-old former West Midlands Police superintendent in connection with an alleged £720,000 ($910K USD) investment fraud that drained a single woman's accounts over eighteen months. The badge was not on the table. It did not need to be.
Jeffrey Royer, a former FBI special agent already convicted once for corruption, pleaded guilty in Detroit to a forex investment fraud that ran from 2020 through 2023. The monthly statements his investors received showed steady gains. The account was bleeding.
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.