Confidence Tricks: Tirana’s Place in an International ‘Investment’ Scam

On November 14, 2018, a woman called Merce Puig Ribot walked into a police station in the small town of Puigcerda in Catalonia, Spain, to complain that she had been defrauded of more than half a million euros by a company masquerading as a stock market investment intermediary.

More than three years later, in April 2022, Ribot visited the police station again, this time to tell investigators that she had lost another 291,000 euros after being contacted by someone claiming to represent a legal services company that could help recoup her original losses.

The 'companies', however, were one and the same. "Both were part of the same fraudulent scheme carried out by the same organisation," prosecutors wrote in an investigation report on the case obtained by BIRN.

Using IP geolocation, Spanish prosecutors tracked the original company that contacted Ribot - Universe Markets - to call centres in Albania, Ukraine and Serbia, and uncovered a dozen similar platforms created by a single international crime network known as 'Milton Group'.

The group is alleged to have used call centres in Albania, Bulgaria, Georgia, North Macedonia and Ukraine to almost a quarter of a million people since 2018, raking in roughly 50 million euros per quarter, according to the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, Eurojust.

In November last year, authorities raided six of the call centres in Albania and arrested four people. One man wanted by the Spanish police, however, was not among them - Armant Josifi, a former adviser to current Albanian Foreign Minister Olta Xhacka and business partner of Olsi Rama, the brother of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

The call centres that were raided are owned by three companies connected to Josifi, who is now...