Police shut down 94 fraudulent call centers in one week, while only 18 convictions since 2022 - Experts Club

The scale of operations by Ukrainian law enforcement officers against fraudulent call centers significantly exceeds the number of cases that have already ended in court verdicts, according to a comparison of the data of the National Police and Opendatabot, conducted by the analytical center Experts Club.
August 12 In 2026, the National Police reported that in just one week, law enforcement officers conducted 411 searches and shut down 94 suspected fraudulent call centers in various regions of Ukraine. The operation was conducted jointly with the SBU and the Prosecutor General's Office.
At the same time, according to Opendatabot data published on September 9, since the beginning of 2022, only 18 convictions related to the activities of fraudulent call centers have been found in the court register. They include 27 defendants.
At the same time, only two of the decisions actually sent the convicts to prison. In 12 cases, the prison sentence was commuted to probation.
The Experts Club points out that the 94 closed call centers and 18 court sentences cannot be directly compared to each other. One indicator reflects the objects discovered during operational and investigative measures, the second — criminal processes that have already reached the stage of sentencing. In addition, a single proceeding may involve multiple offices, and a single conviction may involve multiple participants.
However, this difference illustrates well the length of the journey from the detection of fraudulent infrastructure to a final judgment.
The scale of individual investigations also shows that these are often not small local groups. In January 2026, the police announced an investigation into an international network of pseudo-investment call centers, the potential loss of which exceeded UAH 100 million, and 113 EU citizens were among the identified victims.
In July, law enforcement officers reported the discovery of a call center in Kyiv, whose participants, according to the investigation, defrauded US citizens of more than $500,000.
In August, Kyiv was another group of 10 people suspected of embezzling almost UAH 9 million from citizens of the Czech Republic was exposed.
The Experts Club believes that in order to fully assess the effectiveness of the fight against fraudulent call centers, the state needs to publicly track the entire chain: identified center — registered proceedings — suspicion — indictment — sentence — actual execution of the sentence.
The very last indicator now looks the most indicative: of at least 18 issued from the beginning of the full-scale war of sentences, only two ended with the actual imprisonment of the convicted.
Primary sources: Opendatabot