Inside Israel-linked call centre in Turkey that scammed Indians

Istanbul: The pitch almost always began with USD 250. Put that in and watch it grow, the caller would say. For many investors in India who picked up the phone, it was the first step into a scheme that did not let go until their savings were gone, two people who worked inside the fraud said.

Both moved from Pakistan to Istanbul for academics. One is a computer science graduate who worked in the industry for about two years. The other a political science student who spent a few weeks there and backed off soon after. Both worked at call centres of the kind Turkish authorities now link to an international forex and cryptocurrency fraud network with Israeli connections. 

They spoke to Saisat.com on condition of anonymity on how the scam worked. We are using the names Mike and Neha to refer them in the article.

Their accounts come a little over a month after one of Turkey’s biggest crackdowns on such operations. On September 18, Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced on X that police, the National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) and Interpol had carried out raids at 286 addresses in Istanbul and Muğla. Authorities targeted 42 call centres run by 28 companies, with 239 people being named as suspects. 

Turkish officials estimate that about 13 billion lira (USD 266 million) moved through the network over two years.

The figures have shifted as the case has gone on. Authorities first reported 175 detentions. That number later rose to 201 – 156 Turkish nationals and 45 foreigners. On September 21, 211 suspects were produced in court. Israeli media reported that nine Israeli citizens were among those held. Turkish broadcaster TRT World put the figure at 15 and said they held management roles.

Officials said the network mainly targeted people in Europe, the Far East and Africa. Both insiders, however, said the largest market where they worked was India.

Nobody is rejected: Whistleblower

Mike came to Istanbul in 2020 for a computer science engineering degree and graduated in 2024. While hunting for a job, he came across an Instagram advertisement for what looked like a marketing firm.

“They called me in for an interview and asked me to join the very next week,” he told Siasat.com. After a training programme, he was made a “senior account manager.” Everyone inside, he said, understood the title to mean “master scammer.”

Agents were given stage names chosen to sound right to Indians. His company had two teams for India, about 25 people in all. Its monthly takings averaged close to USD 500,000 and peaked at USD 750,000. “In this market, those are considered rookie numbers,” he said.

Such firms, Mike said, present themselves as marketing or IT consultancies. They post ads on social media promising high pay for little experience. International students from India and Pakistan, many of them desperate for work, are an easy pool. “Almost everybody who applies is hired. Nobody is rejected,” he said. 

Companies range from 200 to 1,000 employees, he said. They run separate desks for Hindi, English, Japanese, French and some Southeast Asian languages.

Neha came to Istanbul in 2024 to study political science and international relations. She speaks Urdu and was placed in the Hindi team, which she said was the largest at her company.

She left the company a few weeks into it after witnessing what she described as a “traumatic experience” of a victim selling his wife’s jewellery to invest. 

“They hired me in the Hindi team because Urdu is close to Hindi,” she told Siasat.com. In training, she was taught phrases familiar from Bollywood films, such as “aapne chinta nahi karni (you don’t have to worry)” and “aap hamara vishwas karein (believe us).” The phrases were meant to convince callers she was Indian. 

If someone asked where she was calling from, she was to say Bengaluru or Pune. “Cities where educated people live, so we could use a few English words,” she said.

Training also included clips from the film The Wolf of Wall Street. The stated aim was to teach sales skills. Neha said the real purpose was to build a culture.

From USD 250 to everything

Both insiders described the same structure. The conversion desk turned a lead into a depositor by securing a first payment of USD 250. “People are told this is the only money they will ever need to invest and that it will eventually turn into millions,” Mike said.

Leads came from online ads, Neha said. The companies seemed to have people’s numbers even when they had not filled in any form. After the first deposit, the file went to what was called the quality control team. Its job was to work out how much more could be taken. 

Callers would insist the company was fully regulated, then ask for a photograph of the victim’s Aadhaar card and details of their job. “Some people volunteer everything themselves, how much they have saved, what property they own,” Neha said.

Then came retention. Neha described it as a team of “extremely cruel sales agents.” Mike called it the place “where the real scam lies.”

Victims were first shown profits on their USD 250. Then they were nudged to put in USD 500 or USD 1,000, which also seemed to do well. “In some cases, we actually transferred the so-called profit to the victim’s account to gain their trust, until we could push for big numbers depending on their financial situation,” Mike told Siasat.com. “From then on, the victim is stuck until they run out of money, or, in rare cases, they’re smart and walk away.”

When clients saw losses and asked for their money back, agents first tried to talk them out of withdrawing. If they persisted, Mike said, the trade was made to “crash” on screen. The money stayed with the company.

Neha recalled colleagues talking about a retention team leader so effective that some of his clients sold their homes and took loans to keep investing. He could pull USD 50,000 out of a single client, she said. 

She said he was deported to Pakistan after a raid but carried on working online targeting Indian investors.

Turkish investigators have described a similar playbook. They say the platforms displayed fabricated gains to draw in larger deposit and brands were dropped and replaced once complaints piled up.

Following the money

Payments from India went through local “vendors” who supplied bank accounts, Mike said. “I suspect those accounts were opened in the name of someone who has died or a poor person who has no idea what is happening,” he said. The accounts had to be changed often because they kept getting blocked.

Crypto was preferred because it avoided the vendors’ commission and agents who brought money in that way were paid more, he said.

The companies ran in-house tech teams that built the trading websites and back-end systems, Mike said. He also said “people in Israel” handled transactions and moved the money around. Saisat.com could not independently verify these claims.

Turkish prosecutors allege that the network’s leaders deliberately set up call centres outside the countries they targeted. They also allege employees were explicitly told not to defraud Israeli or American citizens. According to TRT World, staff were barred from speaking Hebrew on the premises. Investigators have linked a detained Israeli national, who also holds a Portuguese passport, to a company registered in Limassol, Cyprus.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has said it is handling the matter and working to protect the rights of its citizens detained in Turkey.

Only the students get caught: Whistleblower

Mike said the man who ran his company was an Arab Israeli with a background in cybersecurity. When police raided the company in 2025, he said, around 50 to 55 people were detained, including several women. Mike was not deported. The company kept operating and kept hiring, he said.

“I’m not alleging that the police are involved, but it is likely someone powerful is helping these companies survive,” he said. “Every time there’s a raid, it is the international students working without permits who are arrested and deported. The people running the companies seem to walk free.”

For the students, the cost is high. “They came to Istanbul to study. They lose their place at university and they get deported,” he said.

A business that moved offshore

The industry’s roots go back to Israel’s binary options boom of the early 2010s. Simona Weinglass of The Times of Israel exposed it in 2016 in a series that began with “The Wolves of Tel Aviv.” After international pressure, the Knesset banned the industry in October 2017. Turkish officials say the ban did not end the business. Instead, they say, it pushed operations abroad – to Cyprus, Georgia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and, eventually, Turkey.

In March 2025, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), working with Swedish broadcaster SVT and more than 30 media partners, published “Scam Empire.” It was based on leaked data from two groups of call centres in Israel, Eastern Europe and Georgia. 

The investigation found they had persuaded about 32,000 people to make fake “investments” worth at least USD 275 million since 2021. Turkish officials say the Istanbul operation used the same methods. It has not been established that they are part of the same network.

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