In a nondescript office building tucked away in the heart of Tbilisi, Georgia, a network of scammers-young, well-educated, and ruthless-spent their days impersonating financial advisers and manipulating thousands of people across the globe. Their victims believed they were investing in cryptocurrency or recovering stolen funds, when in fact they were being led deeper into a web of deception. This was not a one-off con but a highly organized, shockingly lucrative criminal enterprise built on cold-hearted lies and executed with chilling precision.

Known internally as “skameri,” these fraudsters operated out of a call center run by a company called A.K. Group. The firm presented itself as a legitimate telemarketing business, but an extraordinary leak of 1.1 terabytes of internal data has exposed the dark truth: the company brought in over $35 million from more than 6,000 victims between May 2022 and February 2025. Now, thanks to a joint investigation by OCCRP and its partners in Georgia-Studio Monitori, iFact, and GMC-the veil of anonymity that once shielded these scammers has been torn away.

One such victim, a 59-year-old factory worker from Alexandria, Canada, named Marcel, was drawn into the scam’s vortex over the course of several months. He was first approached by a woman calling herself “Veronika,” who claimed she represented an investment platform called “Golden Currencies.” Veronika encouraged him to invest small amounts, telling colleagues that he was eager and “motivated.” What she omitted was that Marcel had already been conned out of approximately 200,000 Canadian dollars and was desperate to recover his losses.

Enter “Mary Roberts,” the pseudonym of a 26-year-old Georgian scammer and star performer at A.K. Group. She claimed to work for “Blockchain” and assured Marcel that........

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