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Following an 11-day trial “conducted under heightened security measures,” a German court on Thursday sentenced a central figure in a massive call center scam operation previously exposed by OCCRP.
The Bamberg Regional Court in Bavaria announced a sentence of seven years and six months due to two counts of commercial and organized fraud.
The court’s announcement did not name the person sentenced. However, an OCCRP reporter who visited the court prior to the hearings photographed a schedule that matched the time and date of the sentencing in the case.
The hearing schedule also cited the same charges included in the court’s announcement. And the schedule identified the same judge, with the surname Götz, who was named in the announcement.
The hearing schedule identified the man on trial as Mikheil Biniashvili, who is a citizen of both Georgia and Israel, according to the indictment.
The verdict is not yet final, and Biniashvili retains the right to appeal. His lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment.
The court found that between January 2017 and May 2019, Biniashvili ran a scam call-center operation based in Albania that at its peak employed up to 600 people, including “specially trained personnel who misled numerous individuals.”
The court announcement said that after victims registered online for a fraudulent investment scheme, the employees contacted them by phone and “personal trust was immediately built in order to persuade them to ‘invest’ as large sums of money as possible.”
According to the court’s announcement, “the presiding judge at the regional court, Götz, stated in his oral explanation of the verdict that the victims had been ‘lied to through the nose,’ as the funds obtained through the deposits were never invested but simply pocketed.”
The court found that deposits made by victims — primarily in German-speaking countries — resulted in losses of about 8 million euros ($9.4 million). It attributed an additional 42 million euros ($49.5 million) in damages to Biniashvili’s role in supplying software to other fraudulent operations.
“Entire savings were lost, and entire livelihoods were destroyed,” the court said.
Biniashvili was also responsible for creating and supplying specialized software that underpinned the scam. After leaving the Albanian call center, he went on to sell the software to other criminal groups, allowing the fraud model to be replicated elsewhere, the court said.
In 2020, OCCRP reported on a network of call centers spanning Georgia, Albania and Ukraine, which employed large teams of salespeople to pitch bogus investments to victims worldwide. While the call centers used different brand names with customers, they were known internally as Milton Group in Ukraine and Morgan Limited in Georgia.
Another Georgia-based scam call center exposed last year in OCCRP’s “Scam Empire” investigation utilized a “customer relationship management” software called PumaTS to track its engagement with potential victims. The same software is also named in Biniashvili’s indictment.
The indictment states that he “provided IT services, namely the PumaTS software, to fraudulent call centers. Through these acts, the accused enriched himself considerably at the expense of his victims."
Alongside the prison sentence, the court ordered the seizure of 2.4 million euros ($2.8 million) in proceeds linked to the fraud. Biniashvili admitted his role in the operation, according to the court statement.
“The defendant had fully confessed as part of a plea agreement during the main hearing and apologized to the victims in his final statement,” the court said.