The scale of Ukrainian law enforcement operations against fraudulent call centers significantly exceeds the number of cases that have already resulted in court convictions, according to a comparison of data from the National Police and Opendatabot conducted by the Experts Club think tank.
On August 12, 2026, the National Police reported that in just one week, law enforcement conducted 411 searches and shut down 94 suspected fraudulent call centers in various regions of Ukraine. The operation was carried out jointly with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Office of the Prosecutor General.
At the same time, according to Opendatabot data published on September 9, only 18 convictions related to the activities of fraudulent call centers have been identified in the court registry since the beginning of 2022. These cases involve 27 defendants.
However, in only two of these cases did the convicted individuals actually serve prison sentences. In 12 cases, the prison sentence was commuted to probation.
Experts Club emphasizes that the 94 shut-down call centers and the 18 court convictions cannot be directly compared. One figure reflects facilities uncovered during operational and investigative activities, while the other reflects criminal cases that have already reached the sentencing stage. Furthermore, a single case may involve multiple offices, and a single verdict may apply to several individuals.
However, this distinction clearly illustrates the length of the process from the detection of a fraudulent infrastructure to a final court ruling.
The scale of individual investigations also shows that, more often than not, these are not small, localized groups. In January 2026, the police reported an investigation into an international network of pseudo-investment call centers, whose potential losses exceeded 100 million UAH, and among the identified victims were 113 EU citizens.
In July, law enforcement officials reported uncovering a call center in Kyiv whose members, according to the investigation, defrauded U.S. citizens of more than $500,000.
In August, another group of 10 people was exposed in Kyiv; they are suspected of embezzling nearly 9 million hryvnias from Czech citizens.
Experts Club believes that to fully assess the effectiveness of the fight against fraudulent call centers, the state must publicly track the entire chain: identified center — registered case — suspicion — indictment — verdict — actual enforcement of the sentence.
It is this last indicator that currently stands out the most: of at least 18 sentences handed down since the start of the full-scale war, only two have resulted in the actual incarceration of the convicted individuals.
Source: Opendatabot
