I thought it would be like The Wolf of Wall Street: A former scam-firm employee’s personal story

A rare day at ForkLog’s news desk passes without word that yet another ambitious project has turned out to be a scam. But today we spoke with a specific person who worked in financial companies whose sole aim was to defraud trusting investors around the world. Together with Evgeny ForkLog explored how the scam industry attracts staff and “clients,” how crypto-asset fraud resembles classic “phone scams,” and why you can scarcely expect to leave this “business” easily.

ForkLog: How did you even end up working for dubious projects? Can you say what those companies were?

Evgeny: There’s little point in listing concrete projects, they kept mutating and changing names even while I was there. It was the mid-2010s, after the Crimea events. I worked in a bank then; our main clients were citizens from post‑Soviet states, primarily Russia. Their numbers—and money—dwindled. I realised I had to move on. 

My first firm I found through an advertisement. I didn’t know much about this hellish world that exists parallel to ours. Of course I had heard that some people trade on the forex market, but I couldn’t grasp the scale. 

It happened in Latvia. There is an analog of Avito with a striking name SS.LV — you can imagine what level the job adverts there have. I came across one: “Sales department manager required.” The salary was listed fairly high — a fixed €600. By Riga standards, that was decent money. I sent my résumé and went to smoke in the stairwell, leaving my phone at home. I came back and found several missed calls. I rang, and they asked me first: “You don’t want the job? Why aren’t you answering the phone?” I thought: interesting, they’re very interested in me. I was young and did not question anything: if you’re invited, you go. 

It was a group interview. They told us: today you’ll spend the whole day studying the working materials. I asked what the company did. They said: trading on stock markets. They handed out papers with pretty charts, Japanese candlesticks. It was a test of stamina: at lunch break some applicants went out to eat and smoke — they didn’t come back. 

The next day they called me to ask when I was ready to start. I said: right now. But I wasn’t allowed to start immediately; first I underwent the so‑called training.

ForkLog: What did it involve?

Evgeny: Primarily you are taught how to talk to clients. There was a separate employee who online listened to roughly 50% of the conversations. She had a checklist, and she marked everything. The list had to be filled at least 80%. In other words, you had to talk to the client using a script, the purpose of which was to lure them with boilerplate phrases. If your weekly checklist wasn’t filled to at least 80%, you’d be called in for a chat and told: if this continues, you’ll be out in the cold.

On a day you had to dial at least 150 numbers, and there was a floating minimum for call duration. In the first firm we targeted the Russian audience, and people after Crimea had been financially devastated; depositing $200 was unimaginable for them. And there you are, talking on the script, promising returns of 30% per month [laughs], stating that the minimum deposit is $200. At this point the conversation ends, because for many people their monthly salary was not more than that amount. Experienced colleagues, however, would say: “Can’t you take out a loan? Let’s look on the map together to see where instant loans are available nearby.”

ForkLog: And didn’t the colleagues have any doubts?

Evgeny: Many people who go into this “business” do not understand what they are doing at all. They truly think their clients trade something and make money. From the vantage point of years, that seems utter nonsense, but by the end of the first month suspicions started creeping in. Only then did I feel obliged to read up on the company I had joined. And I thought: “What on earth am I doing?”

ForkLog: And what exactly was it?

Evgeny: The same as scammers have always done, long before the internet. In this business, if anything changes, it’s only the means of communication. It used to be the phone: you had to call — again and again. Everyone had procedures: if the client doesn’t answer from one number three times, switch to another. You could set up auto-dial: the client lives somewhere like Sakhalin, and at three in the morning the phone is ringing off the hook [snerks]. We naturally sent emails too, but who reads them? Back then messaging apps weren’t as widespread, so the main instrument was the telephone.

In such firms there are usually several departments. The task of the first, conversion, is to persuade the client to deposit and tell them how they allegedly will earn. The person then goes to the retention department. For the client, there are no terms like “conversion” and “retention”; for him there’s a “junior financial analyst,” who after the deposit forwards him to the “senior financial analyst.” If the client has money, milking them for the first deposit isn’t hard. The aim is to do everything as quickly as possible before they go online to read what they’ve encountered.

Front-line work is simple: you can promise the client anything, because their deposit will never be recovered — that is a certainty. But in retention, they should at least get something. The principle is the same as in a casino: the client should win something and take it home to come back for more. 

There are firms without a second department. Then a client deposits $200, then a second deposit, say, $20,000, after which they block him — and that’s all. But usually the scammers think that’s wrong. Not for ethical reasons, but because if a person managed to deposit $20,000, he must be milked to the last drop. 

From my first company I fled in horror after only three months. I had never seen anything like it in my life.

ForkLog: What was so particularly wild there?

Evgeny: These operators had a virus that infected a computer and then sent messages on Skype, offering to start trading on our platform. The information about this, of course, was held by the managers. And I once had the following incident.

I called a prospective client. He asked: “Who are you anyway?” I said: “A friend of yours recommended you to us.” To which the client says: “Listen, kid, I was sitting at my computer in the evening watching a film, and I got a message about your firm.” “Ah, well, that’s your friend; he trades with us.” “But my friend died five years ago.”

I didn’t make much money from this; my largest deposit was $500, from which I earned 5% and moved on to another place. 

ForkLog: How do you explain to yourself what you were doing, morally speaking, in not‑so‑orderly ways?

Evgeny: It’s a very good question. When you start asking it, your boss usually says: “If a person gets into the business, they will surely lose money; the question is ours or someone else’s. So you just have to work and not think about it.”

Targeting the powerless poor pensioners is something I didn’t want to do, so I tried not to work in the CIS market. But that was a fixation of mine; usually in this business there are no highly moral people. The most moral are the tech-support staff. They must either be empathetic when deceived investors ask what’s going on, or pretend they don’t care about their problems.

ForkLog: Did angry clients not try to find you and do something bad?

Evgeny: No. The address on the site was a shed on the outskirts of Glasgow. They occasionally sent furious letters by mail, including from lawyers. Once they even sent a letter from the Arizona Secretary of State: “We will find you and punish you, you villains!” We read them and laughed.

ForkLog: Did you ever have cases where it became utterly unbearable to take money from people?

Evgeny: I had one such case. I extracted $10,000 from an American man, money he had saved for his son’s university. But once you accumulate $10,000, you can earn more; America is a land of opportunity. I know stories of people working the Russian market who coerced others so that they had to pawn their cars. I always found that repugnant. If you’re going to rob, target the rich fools.

ForkLog: And what other nuances were there in dealing with clients, besides having to show sympathy when a dead friend recommended trading on your platform?

Evgeny: By the way, for any derivative of the word “game” you could immediately get a talking‑to and get fired. It’s children playing with toys; here adults earn money.

ForkLog: So about gamification—you can forget it if your aim is to take money from people dishonestly?

Evgeny: Times change, and so does the approach to clients. Cryptocurrencies have given scammers more freedom: people don’t expect much from them and are willing to hand over money, understanding the high risks. In other words, they take it more lightly. Plus—the barrier to entry is significantly lower.

When I started, cent brokers did not exist; they appeared later when firms targeted India and Bangladesh. For them the deposit was lowered to $5, allowing trading in cents. And for us, if a client didn’t have big money, we were not interested in dealing with them. This was even one of the manipulation tactics — tell the client of a high bar and humiliate them so they protest: “You think I’m poor?” and they proceed to deposit money saved for their funeral. Such is the psychology. 

The popularity of crypto substantially expanded the audience. It doesn’t matter how solvent they are; the key is that they are numerous. You can focus on quantity rather than deposit size. Personal communication becomes unnecessary: with two thousand clients with tiny deposits, a bot will handle them at best. 

ForkLog: You yourself didn’t dabble in penny markets?

Evgeny: There were clients from Southeast Asia. For some reason they constantly asked me: “Mate, you’re into this, you probably make huge money yourself?” The reply was: no, as employees we’re forbidden to use our own system. “Really? That’s a pity. But still a cool job you have.”

ForkLog: Insider trading, then.

Evgeny: Yes. With the caveat that no one actually trades anything themselves.

In the scam world, everyone dreams of the American market. That audience is highly solvent and, at the same time, quite naive, to put it mildly. When I worked for a second firm with Americans, I felt no moral qualms. First, they know how to execute chargebacks. I don’t know how it is now, but several years ago, in Russia this was poorly understood; banks claimed they hadn’t heard of it. In the US it is a common theme: something didn’t please you? Call the bank, press one button and the money comes back. The bank sorts it out and those who need to be brought to heel get there. 

Americans love to dump $5,000 onto the first deposit, lose it all, and execute a chargeback. And that’s that [laughs]. 

ForkLog: This reminds one of the recent news about how a married couple in the US organised a pyramid scheme—“Blessing of God through Cryptocurrency.” They defrauded dozens of people of $6 million.

Evgeny: I have a relevant anecdote from my own experience. In the second firm I worked the night shift; it started at 22:00 Riga time and ended at 8:00. My task was to cover a financially capable audience living in the American time zones. I remember with one client we hadn’t even finished talking when a message arrived that a deposit had been made for several thousand dollars. And then another one. It turned out that within two hours I somehow earned $5,000 and didn’t even realise how. 

Then one of my colleagues came and asked: “Did money not come from such-and-such?” I tell this story and worry that I did something wrong. “No, all fine. Next time pass it to me; this is my retention client — an American pastor who put a referral link on his church’s website.”

In the end, that firm involved 20 church congregants [laughs]. It sounds absurd, but we even visited their site; it looked like Web 1.0: GIFs of Jesus on the cross, and at the bottom a link to our scam operation. 

ForkLog: And were they not at least unsettled by the fact that they sent money to an unknown recipient far away?

Evgeny: The staff rarely used Russian names, except for one of my colleagues, Vitaly. Occasionally clients rang to ask: “Where is Vitaly — this Russian son of a bitch?”

In the second firm I stayed for more than a year. There was no fixed pay; instead you earned 10% of the client’s deposit. In the end I earned around €3,000 a month. I was making that much for the first time, but there was nothing to spend it on with that schedule. So I dragged friends to pubs, then went to work drunk at night. 

It was fun, because sometimes I’d arrive completely inebriated and the first hour I’d mutter into the phone and drink tea to steady myself. In that state it’s easy to talk to clients. In selling-call centres there’s even a trick: if a novice is shy about talking to people, you pour him a drink to loosen the tongue.

In the early days I feared my English wouldn’t suffice. That’s when I realised America is indeed a country of immigrants, because half the clients’ English was even worse. 

This is, of course, impressive: you sit on one edge of the world, the interlocutor on the other, and money comes into your pocket by the magic of your voice. It was fun, but again you must account for age — I was 25 then, and I took life much more lightly. 

ForkLog: And did it all end well?

Evgeny: No, I just grew tired. After constant night work I began having health problems. You cannot live like a vampire: work at night, sleep by day. Moreover, I was studying for a master’s degree. After work I slept a few hours and then went to university. Add that I drank daily, and you can imagine what happened to my head under that stress. 

Living for the day is fun, but it grows old quickly. Especially when you’re talking to normal people who, from 9:00 to 18:00, drink coffee with biscuits in the office, and you’re too embarrassed to tell them what you do. 

ForkLog: Why did you decide to tell this story now, one you can hardly be proud of?

Evgeny: I want to give readers a lesson. When you begin working in scams, don’t think the people running them are white and fluffy. You’re as faceless to them as your clients; you, too, can be and will be swindled. In all these firms salary cuts come sooner or later. 

Nobody blamed colleagues more than me when they began to cheat us in the ugliest way. First came a policy of 10% of client deposits, then that amount was linked to your conversion. If the conversion was 25% (i.e., one in four clients deposits—unrealistic), you earned as before. If not—you got 5%. 

I had a case. I went on holiday and returned to find my conversion had, somehow, fallen to zero, even though just before that I had brought the firm around $70,000. It turned out this: while I was away, my counter was left on. Leads landed on me that nobody processed. It was done on purpose. 

ForkLog: How did you realise?

Evgeny: I checked what those leads were; they turned out to be junk. And who would you complain to? You don’t have an employment contract. 

When crypto appeared, it became even more convenient. You could come one day and say: we’ve decided to issue unbacked tokens; you’ll be paid in them. If you don’t like it—nobody holds you. 

At one point I was paid in bitcoin with phrases like: “By month-end it will rise; you’ll earn even more than usual.” “And if it crashes?” — “Don’t worry.” That “don’t worry” is classic. In scam firms people keep swapping money. I wouldn’t advise tying your future to this. 

ForkLog: What, in your view, is the scam’s most pervasive area in crypto?

Evgeny: It’s not so much the scale as the ubiquity of the phenomenon. Scams aren’t limited to small outfits. At a certain point, entry barriers became very low. In crypto, for example, there is no issue ordering a turn‑key solution, paying a not-very-large sum, creating a brand, filing the papers in a suitable jurisdiction, and then running advertising and driving traffic. The same story was true for forex and binary options. It was enough to invest $20,000 in a turnkey setup, hire people willing to work for a cut, and off you go. 

Among such firms, naturally, more than a year was rare; one in a hundred survived. There are genuine brokers with European licences. But for such firms the entry barrier is high: strict KYC and a minimum deposit of $10,000. Clients coming to them usually do not have such money. To keep clients from vanishing, the same people who run serious brokers create dummy outfits. When you have personal data and phone numbers, you simply need to find a manager who will call them. 

For a while I worked as a real broker, but there was far less money and the work was very dull. I imagined it would be like The Wolf of Wall Street, but it turned out to be endless conversations with perpetually dissatisfied clients, fixed pay, and, if you were lucky, some percentage at year‑end. And no one was deceiving anyone. 

ForkLog: As someone who talked to plenty of fans of easy money, answer one question. People are told for years not to fall for meme tokens, not to buy shitcoins; the result is always the same — the creators will pump & dump and run off with the money. Why do these exhortations still go unheard?

Evgeny: Pump‑and‑dump of shitcoins is the classic scheme; the infamous Jordan Belfort did the same: hype up rubbish, sell it, and then everything collapses. In other words, the tools don’t change. 

Incidentally, The Wolf of Wall Street helped popularise the scam trade. Even though the film is instructive, scenes from it are shown in various fraudulent firms to boost staff motivation. 

ForkLog: In your view, which area is most scam-prone in the crypto industry?

Evgeny: I think it’s arbitrage. I sometimes watch a YouTube video by a young man who says he makes €5,000 a day from it. He even had to move into an office in Moscow‑City, though he says he doesn’t like it there, and he invests the money in real estate. He bought a neon‑green Geländewagen to haul materials for the workers building his villa in his spare time. In short, a proper guy; you’ll find the link in the description if you want to be the same. It seems obvious to me.

The most interesting part is that all this is virtually unregulatable. Only the United States can really tighten the screws in this space. With the SEC you can’t fight it; it’s a regulator that acts with a heavy hand and always insists on its line. Forex in America died in one fell swoop when the SEC required all brokers to publish statistics on how much money clients lose. You visit the site of a perfectly legitimate broker licensed by the SEC and the first thing you see is a massive disclaimer: “89% of our clients lose all their money.” That alone discourages people from pursuing such ventures. 

But in Europe and most post‑Soviet countries, scam volumes are astronomical. It’s an endless story built on human folly, laziness and a desire to get rich, so scams will be eternal and capable of adapting. If they ban eyeball scanners, they will come up with some cubes that scan buttocks instead.

I think many problems could have been avoided if people were given legitimate ways to lose their money. A properly regulated online casino that pays taxes might be preferable to a scam in the grey zone. People will always want to lose money; you cannot change that. But the state should not forbid it entirely; it should steer it to its advantage. If I were a policy maker, I might even open government stalls with Russian roulette…

ForkLog: A blockchain‑oriented future.

Evgeny: Yes. If you pull the trigger, you lose; if you don’t, you win a watermelon. You could also resurrect the “bars” (link), this time with a blockchain prefix to stay current.

ForkLog: Exit scams can catch even experienced traders, as FTX showed. Is it possible to spot a particularly crafty fraudster before you hand over money?

Evgeny: If we’re talking about crypto exchanges, the answer is probably no. Anything can fail. The basic rule: don’t send money anywhere after calls or messages in messaging apps, because those places are where NLP techniques are deployed [laughs].

The surest sign of a scam is a promise of a concrete (usually unrealistically high) return that does not depend on the market. Returns may exist on bank deposits, but money does not appear from thin air. Another sign is the absence of KYC. In a legitimate firm you’re never offered an account without verifying your documents. Every genuine firm has a set of requirements that a client must meet. Some, for example, do not operate in certain jurisdictions. 

With scams, nothing is asked of you at entry, but everything is demanded at withdrawal: provide documents proving you are you, show notarised utility bills, and other nonsense. If you’re not asked for anything at the entry, you will be at the exit. It’s the same story as with Russian tourists in Egypt: boarding a camel is free; dismounting costs $100, or you’ll roam the desert forever. All serious exchanges have KYC; if not, that’s a red flag. 

You should also study the jurisdiction in which the company is registered and who licensed it. In Russia forex was regulated by the Central Bank. When the shop was shut, a structure called the Centre for Regulation of Financial Market Relations (ЦРОФР) emerged. It issued certificates that resembled forms printed in an underground passage. This was hatched by scammers who sold licences to other scammers so they could display on their site that they were regulated by a pseudo‑regulator. 

ForkLog: What moral did you draw from your experience working in fraudulent firms?

Evgeny: It’s better not to start in this field. Easy money becomes addictive, and you won’t be able to land a normal job later. If you work in scams for five years, you’ll leave a huge gap in your résumé. Worse, your sense of business becomes skewed because what you do is not really a business. It’s no accident that in English this profession is called a con artist — the key word is artist.

Read job ads carefully. If you see an ad for a call centre role requiring English and a salary of at least $500 a month, you’re unlikely to be renting cars for tourists; you’ll be deceiving people over the phone. 

If even that doesn’t deter you, I’ll repeat: for people who work in scams, employees are the same as clients. They’ll never forget to con you, and you won’t prove anything to anyone.

So simply don’t go into this field. Better to become a digger and give tours of sewer conduits.