OCCRP investigation exposes a ‘scam empire’ of call centres in Georgia

• 3 min read

▲The people believed to be managing A.K. Group, a company operating a scam call centre in Tbilisi, Akaki Kevkhishvili (left) and Meri Shotadze (centre). Photo: iFact.

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An OCCRP investigation has exposed a scam call centre located in downtown Tbilisi believed to have scammed $35 million out of victims in Europe and Canada between 2022 and 2025.

The investigation was published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on Wednesday.

It brought together 32 journalists, including from Georgia’s iFact and Squander Detector, to investigate the ‘scam empire’ over eight months. They focused on a scam call centre called the A.K. Group and how their employees extorted thousands or tens of thousands of dollars from victims around the world.

The investigation, titled ‘diamonds, Dior, and Dubai vacations: the luxurious lives of Georgia’s call-center scammers’, also focused heavily on the lavish lifestyles enjoyed by the company’s management and employees.

It was based on 1.9 terabytes of leaked data obtained by the Swedish Television, whose reporters exposed groups of call centres based in Israel and Georgia. The leaks contained hallway surveillance footage, screenshots of internal chats, phone recordings, and various documents.

iFact reported that the person who provided the materials told them that the scammers should be punished.

The A.K. Group LLC operated out of two offices located in Tbilisi, with around 85 employees. They are believed to have stolen $35.3 million from more than 6,100 people worldwide between May 2022 and February 2025.

The official owner of A.K. Group is 36-year-old Meri Shotadze, who, according to the investigation, manages a group of young people who speak a variety of languages.

The investigation deduced that Akaki Kevkhishvili, 33, could be Shotadze’s business partner.

One of their offices is located near the State Security Service’s headquarters in central Tbilisi on Kavtaradze street, while the other is located on Shartava street. Records have indicated that both offices used by A.K. Group are rented by companies owned by people who appear to be proxies — Zaza Izoria, a man registered as an IDP from Abkhazia and his 71-year-old mother-in-law.

According to the investigation, employees of A.K. Group are instructed to not use their real names on Telegram channels used for internal communications, in which they can be seen referring to themselves as ‘scammers’.

Scammers that the journalists have identified have also extensively posted about their lavish vacations, lifestyles, and expensive purchases on social media. They are believed to earn ‘more than $20,000 a month’.

They were able to identify scammers through loose ends they had left untied or clues they or the company had accidentally left. Journalists working on the investigation have reached out to employees of A.K. Group that they had identified, but have not heard back from them. However, the purported employees ‘almost immediately’ began purging their social media accounts and presence after being contacted by the journalists.

The General Prosecutor’s Office has officially launched an investigation into the company after receiving inquiries from journalists, the investigation reported.

‘In case of detection of any criminal activity, it will respond in accordance with Georgian legislation’, replied the Prosecutor’s Office.

Screenshots from Telegram groups believed to be used by the scammers showed that they were aware of how they were impacting the lives of their victims.

‘Sometimes they even insult their victims — verbally abusing them or mocking them for falling for the scam’, wrote iFact.

Georgian law enforcement agencies, including the Prosecutor’s Office, have repeatedly announced over the years that they have shut down a number of similar fraudulent call centres across Georgia and have launched investigations into fraudulent call centres.

‘However, it seems they still have a lot to shut down’, wrote iFact.