site.btaPhone Scams in Bulgaria Defrauded Victims of BGN 3.5 Mln Since Start of 2023

From the beginning of 2024 until the end of September, nearly 100,000 fraudulent calls to telecom subscribers have been identified. The damage fraudsters caused their victims since the beginning of 2023 has amounted to more than BGN 3.5 million. This transpired at a news briefing where the National Police announced the start of an awareness raising campaign against phone scams on Thursday.  

The police is partnering in the campaign with Kaufland Bulgaria.

"Phone scammers no longer call only landlines, but also mobile phones", said Inspector Zlatka Padinkova, head of the Fraud Sector at the General Directorate National Police. The victims are most often elderly people aged 70-75 and over. The largest number of phone scam attempts were in Sofia, Varna and Burgas (on the Black Sea).

From the beginning of 2024 until the end of September 2024, fraudsters "stole" over BGN 2 million via phone scams. Since the beginning of the year, 359 telephone frauds have been prevented and a total of 49 have been detected. 58 people have been detained. "Until recently, the practice was to make the first call on a landline and then continue the communication on a mobile phone, but now there are cases in which the first call is on the mobile phone", Padinkova clarified.

In the most recent phone fraud schemes, fraudsters call to ask money to assist police in a police operation; for medical treatment or surgery for a close relative; to pay bail for the release of a relative who allegedly caused a traffic accident with an injured or dead person, Commissioner Padinkova said. In another recent case, a caller claimed to be an employee of a utility company and demanded money to pay utility bills.

"If they ask you for money over the phone, that's a phone fraud," Padinkova said. She added that the scammers often become verbally aggressive in order to make the victim to comply with their demands: they use profanities or threaten to send masked men to beat up the victim, use with cynical remarks.

As part of the campaign, awareness-raising information will be distributed in the Kaufland supermarkets and its mobile app. "Our common goal is to explain to people how to recognize phone scams and how to protect themselves against them," said Senior Commissioner Emil Parmakov, deputy director of the National Police.