Dutch Police Dismantle €100 Million-a-Month Crypto Fraud Ring Run Like a Corporation

Dutch police, working with Europol and authorities in several other countries, say they have largely dismantled an international investment fraud network that generated more than €100 million a month at its peak by convincing victims to pour money into fake cryptocurrency trading platforms.

According to Dutch police, the operation ran roughly 20 call centers spread across multiple countries and employed more than 700 people posing as financial advisers. The organization had been active since at least 2021 and was structured like a legitimate company, with a central office overseeing branches that each targeted a specific country or region.

The fraud followed a pattern investigators say has become common in large-scale investment scams: callers spent weeks or months building a relationship with a target before persuading them to invest increasingly large sums, usually through cryptocurrency transfers, into platforms that displayed realistic-looking but entirely fabricated profits. No actual money was ever invested on the victims' behalf. Dutch authorities have so far linked at least 550 fraud reports and roughly $28.6 million in confirmed losses to the network, though police believe the true number of victims worldwide runs into the tens of thousands, with many individual losses exceeding €10,000.

Six suspects have been arrested so far across Poland, Cyprus, Belgium, and Greece. The alleged central figure is a 46-year-old man holding dual Israeli and Polish citizenship, arrested at a Polish airport on May 26 as he arrived from Dubai and since extradited to the Netherlands, where a judge ordered him held in pretrial detention. Dutch police have not released his name, describing him only as someone previously prosecuted for breaking into the systems of several foreign government organizations and as a well-known figure in the hacking world. Dutch media outlets have reported that his age and background match the public record of a hacker who, as a teenager in 1998, broke into Pentagon, NASA, and U.S. military computer systems in an intrusion that American officials initially feared was state-sponsored, and who was later convicted in a separate bank fraud case in 2012. Authorities in the current investigation have not confirmed his identity.

As part of the takedown, Dutch police contacted the commercial hosting providers behind the network's infrastructure, leading to key digital systems being taken offline, and shared suspect information with Europol and partner countries to support ongoing prosecutions. Investigators say the case fits a broader pattern across Europe, where authorities have increasingly shifted from taking down individual fraudulent websites toward dismantling the call-center organizations and financial infrastructure behind them; several other networks accused of laundering hundreds of millions of euros through similar schemes have been broken up over the past year.

Dutch police also warned that victims who tried to withdraw money or grew suspicious were sometimes approached afterward by so-called recovery firms offering to retrieve their lost funds for an upfront fee — a secondary scam that, in many documented cases, has turned out to be run by the same criminal group. Authorities said the investigation is ongoing and additional arrests are possible.