At the start, the job looked like a well-paid role in finance. It ended with a $10,000-a-month drug habit and a cell in a German prison.
That’s the story of Tal-Jacki Z.F., who was involved in an online trading fraud and confessed in 2021 to his part in cheating victims in Germany, Austria and other European countries of almost €9 million .
At the heart of these operations are call centers, dubbed “boiler rooms.” They’re high-pressure environments where the staff rarely know what they are getting into when they are hired, Tal-Jacki said in an interview from his secure rehabilitation facility not far from the German city of Munich. His face reflects the years of alcohol and drug abuse he says he’s been through.
Many of Tal-Jacki’s former associates have been rounded up, but others are still very much in business and they’re being pursued by law-enforcement forces including German senior prosecutor Nino Goldbeck. For mainstream finance, online trading scams are becoming a reputational risk that’s no longer confined to the sidelines. Scammers have mimicked Deutsche Bank’s trading-platform Xmarkets, borrowing the name and its solid appeal to middle-class German investors. Ralph Hamers, former chief executive of Dutch bank ING Groep NV, was burned by investments into a payments business that was investigated for links to money laundering.
Tal-Jackie says Barak hired him to build out a call center. Initially, it wasn’t clear that the business was a criminal enterprise, so successful was the veneer of legitimacy. The job of the operatives is to contact customers who log on to one of the many websites — with names like “Zoomtrader” or “Option888” — and talk them into investing a relatively small amount of cash, with the promise of quick and easy profits.
There are multiple forms of the scams in operation worldwide. Gangs that German prosecutors believe operate out of Asia target vulnerable people in Europe through dating apps. One victim, who asked not to be identified to protect her identity, was a woman from Berlin who lost her life savings. When, at some point, they discussed a common future, he mentioned owning a house and suggested they invest in cryptocurrencies.
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