Munich investigators have once again broken up a fraudulent call center abroad – this time in the Lebanese capital Beirut. “This doesn’t happen every day,” said Kai Gräber, the senior public prosecutor responsible for organized crime, when he reported on the spectacular case at police headquarters on Tuesday: “It shows how far the arm of the Munich prosecutors reaches.”
In Beirut, based on information from the Munich police and international arrest warrants from the local public prosecutor’s office, the police there arrested nine people in September who are suspected of having used fraudulent telephone calls to harm, especially older people in Germany, considerable amounts of money. The callers pretended to be police officers and offered the seniors to take valuables into custody because they had allegedly been targeted by burglars. So-called collectors then received the loot and immediately took it abroad.
The Munich investigators tracked down the call center in Beirut through such a pick-up person, albeit through very convoluted paths, as Chief Detective Desiree Schelshorn from the Working Group (AG) Phenomena reported on Tuesday.
Through the interrogation of the woman arrested in June 2022, they became aware of a 28-year-old accomplice from Munich who most recently worked for a criminal call center gang from Istanbul, embezzled around 10,000 euros there and has been pursued by the clan ever since.
Because the Munich man’s mother was threatened in this context, she filed a complaint. Through various surveillance measures, the Munich investigators then came across a 39-year-old from Bremen who had moved his fraudulent business from Istanbul to Beirut.
“We always assumed that the gangs only operated in Turkey, and we were afraid that our investigations would end in Lebanon,” admitted Schelshorn. But that was by no means the case: our colleagues in Beirut proved to be very cooperative.
Seven of the nine arrested are still in custody, and the Lebanese police had to release two. Among those arrested are two German citizens, the aforementioned 39-year-old and a 21-year-old. Extradition requests are in the works, Gräber said, but procedures in Lebanon take priority. This also applies to the evaluation of the evidence seized.
In the state capital, they cannot yet say how many Munich residents have been harmed by the Beirut gang. As Hans-Peter Chloupek, the head of the AG Phenomena, reported, the criminals have found victims across Germany; A handful are currently known from Bavaria.
As Chief Public Prosecutor Kai Gräber summarized, Beirut was the eighth call center that the Munich specialists have broken up since 2015. Initially it was criminals from Poland who used the so-called grandchild trick; Later, groups from Turkey operated using the scam of fake police officers.
Since this year, criminals have increasingly relied on so-called shock calls in order to cheat their victims, sometimes of considerable sums. Recently, they have even been posing as fake prosecutors, as the real Munich public prosecutor’s office warned just this week.
Because call center fraud is not expected to end, the AG Phenomena, which was founded in 2017, has been upgraded. “The AG was born out of necessity at the time,” said Chloupek, “now it is being transferred to its own commissariat.” Since Tuesday, Chloupek and his expert group, which currently consists of 26 officers, have been operating as Commissariat 61, or K61 for short.