Mark wanted to save for a house and saw an ad for a financial trading site. He believed he was investing and seeing good returns, but when he tried to access his earnings, he lost all his life savings. The Guardian’s senior business reporter, Simon Goodley, tells Michael Safi that Mark is one of thousands of victims of phone-scamming operations in Tbilisi, Georgia, which are believed to have duped people out of at least £27m.

These operations use “good cop, bad cop” and pressure sales tactics to squeeze more money out of their victims. Most people believe they are aware of the risk, but the 6,000 victims of the scams come from all walks of life. The way phone scammers work can now be heard like never before after the leak of a million hours of recorded calls shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2025/mar/06/exposed-listening-in-on-a-35m-phone-scam-podcast