How so called “Call Centers” Helped Bring Down Ukraine’s Prosecutor General

Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko submitted his resignation Tuesday night. He was received by President Zelensky, who approved his resignation after meeting with the heads of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). However, for now, Kravchenko remains prosecutor general. He will remain in the position until Parliament approves his resignation.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Significantly, during an off-the-record briefing on Sunday, Sept. 6, a new format of communication between government officials and journalists, Kravchenko was not planning to resign, according to Kyiv Post sources. However, the escalation of the case involving his subordinates, the alleged links between Kravchenko and those under investigation, and references to Kravchenko by figures implicated in the scandal appear to have left him with little choice. Kravchenko had held the position for only a year and became associated with two major scandals: the attack on NABU in July 2025 and the recent scandal surrounding the “Carthage” operation, which exposed his subordinates to corruption. Significantly, his predecessor, Andriy Kostin, also left office just as quickly. He resigned following the exposure of a scheme involving the mass fabrication of “disabilities” among prosecutors. Hundreds of employees of the prosecutor’s offices obtained disability statuses that entitled them to increased pension benefits. Other Topics of Interest Massive Russian Drone Assault Hits 5 Locations in Kryvyi Rih, Injuring 5 Russian drones struck several locations in Kryvyi Rih overnight, injuring five people and damaging homes and other buildings. In truth, that was where the resignation ended. Over the past year and a half, neither the prosecutors involved nor those who allegedly facilitated the disability claims have faced accountability. In Kravchenko’s case, however, the situation appears considerably more serious. What is “Carthage” and why did it disgust Ukrainians? The “Carthage” operation was carried out by NABU and SAPO over the weekend. The operation exposed millions in shadow money, luxury cars, and informal connections between officials from the Prosecutor General’s Office and a network of fraudulent call centers. Three suspects have already ended up in the dock. Investigators say senior officials spent years systematically protecting the call center network, laundering millions in wealth, and acquiring high-end real estate, expensive vehicles, and other luxury assets. The main figure in the investigation is Serhii Kropyva, deputy head of the International Legal Cooperation Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office. In NABU recordings, he appears under the nickname “Chancellor.” The “Chancellor” was responsible for more than just international affairs. He allegedly also carried out special assignments for Prosecutor General Kravchenko. In particular, he searched for a house for Kravchenko and ultimately found one. Journalists later identified the property as well. Investigators discovered a newly built 300 square meter (3,229 square feet) residence in the elite settlement of Kozyn, near Kyiv. And this became the thread that began unraveling a much larger web of problems. Most Ukrainians were shocked, but focused on the “Chancellor’s” personal enrichment, his brazenness, and his apparent willingness to spend money on his young lover, whom prosecutors say he even planned to appoint as a deputy minister in the Ministry of Education. In recorded conversation, he says: “If you’re going to f*ck, f*ck a queen; if you’re going to steal, steal a million.” However, this was only the tip of the iceberg. There were things that were considerably more serious. In addition to protecting the call centers, the “Chancellor” discusses matters concerning the Prosecutor General. Thus, he boasts to his lover about his impunity and the complete support for the “General,” claiming that he can “push around all the law enforcement officers and do whatever I want.” In another recorded conversation, he says: “If only he could build me an empire like the boss has...” That remark carries far greater significance than the alleged collection of “black cash” from call centers, which, according to our sources, amounts to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars each month. The obvious question is: What kind of empire does this mysterious boss possess? “Call centers” are the new plague What is this? Usually, you can imagine “Call center” as a service. But in Ukraine this term often means not simply about providing services. This term usually about a group of people in the office having data and phone numbers of thousands of people to make calls for fraudulent purposes. These can be calls to lonely pensioners, ill people, and often to those living alone in the middle of the night, trying to extort money. How does it work? A popular case several years ago affected thousands of people. In the middle of the night, usually around three or four in the morning, when a person is sleeping most deeply, the phone would ring. A teenager’s tearful voice would be heard on the other end: “Mom, I got into an accident. I hit someone. This is the end, please, we need to resolve the issue because something bad is going to happen to me. Here’s the card, urgently transfer [amount of money] here.” There were people who, while half-asleep, transferred the money and did not even have time to realize or remember that they did not even have a son or a daughter. Fraudsters also pretend to be a bank’s security service and ask for card details, or they pose as debt collectors, calling lonely pensioners and convincing them that their deceased husband or wife owed someone a large sum of money. The number of such schemes continues to grow. Behind these operations is often a room in a spacious office building, frequently located in the center of a large city. In Kyiv, for example, such call centers are based in prestigious new buildings in the heart of the city, while in Chernihiv, several occupy business centers that, until the outbreak of the full-scale war, were home to IT specialists. The room is typically filled with several dozen employees, most of them young people aged 18-25. Some of them make preliminary calls, and if the victim appears frightened or uncertain, a senior operator joins the conversation. These more experienced callers then “work” the victim. Why do people agree to work at such establishments? The first reason is money. According to Kyiv Post sources, among former callers, lower-level employees typically earn between $1,500-$3,000, while experienced workers can earn even more. In a regional center, such incomes are beyond the reach not only of students but also of people applying for most jobs, regardless of position or experience level. Even in the capital, not every skilled professional earns $3,000. For easy money, people are willing to become fraudsters and manipulators, to pressure people, swear into the phone, and psychologically torment them. “Some of them simply had bad parents, and they think, well, it’s not us, it’s just the way life is,” says one former call center employee. Another young woman says that people who try to leave are often blackmailed. “They told us that we would be working ‘on Russians.’ I didn’t see anything wrong with that because we are at war, they destroyed my city, my relatives are fighting. But over time, we started working less and less on Russians, probably because they introduced some kind of protection system there, and more and more on our own people. And when I and others tried to leave, they told us they would ‘turn us in’ to the security forces and that we would go to prison,” says another call center employee. However, most people go there for easy money. According to our sources, most call center operators do not consider psychological violence and fraud over the phone to be a crime as there is supposedly no physical contact with the victim. While no one knows the exact number of call centers, some put the figure at 550, others at 1,000 or even more. Recently, as a result of just one National Police operation, 94 of them were shut down. But it is obvious that we are talking about thousands of young people. Taking into account the high turnover rate, with many employees leaving after only a few months, the total number of young people involved over the past several years could amount to tens of thousands. “What does this mean? It means that millions of young Ukrainians, right at the start of their lives, are learning to lie, deceive, extort money, and be MERCILESS toward mentally vulnerable people, pensioners, simply unfortunate and downtrodden people, from whom they extract their last money,” writes activist and Ukrainian Armed Forces serviceman Serhii Marchenko. Everyone interviewed by Kyiv Post is convinced that without support or protection from law enforcement agencies, such systematic activity would simply be impossible. Operators know who they are calling. Pensioners, single parents, bank depositors, and so on. Everyone who has tried to investigate the issue of call centers has always faced several questions. Where do the fraudsters get all these enormous databases? Where do they get the mobile phone numbers of tens of thousands of people from different sectors and different social and geographic backgrounds, with different financial and family circumstances? The question now is whether everything will end with the Prosecutor General’s resignation or whether this web will continue to unravel. Clearly, several subordinates of the Prosecutor General, or even the Prosecutor General himself, could not have conducted all of these activities alone. At the very least, not on their own. And that is precisely why Ukrainians are watching these developments with a sense of cold horror.