Ukraine's scam call centres kept reopening. The reason reached the prosecutor general's office.

In August, Ukrainian police shut down 94 scam call centres in a single week. The question nobody could answer at the time was how an industry that size had been allowed to grow in the first place.

An answer of sorts has arrived. Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau named five suspects in a scheme it says collected bribes from fraudulent call centres from mid-2025 onwards in exchange for keeping police away from them. Bail for one suspect, Serhii Kropyva, was set at 120 million hryvnias, roughly 2.7 million dollars, and investigators put the laundered assets at around 89 million hryvnias. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko announced his resignation on 7 September, calling it a political decision; parliament voted him out on Monday and President Zelensky signed the dismissal the same day. Kravchenko has not been charged and flatly denies protecting anyone.

On Wednesday parliament passed the law that had been sitting in the Rada since 2023. Bill 10190 went through in full with 313 votes and creates offences that did not exist before, among them setting up or running an electronic communications fraud organisation, which now carries seven to 12 years and confiscation of property. Until now prosecutors had to squeeze these operations into ordinary fraud charges.

None of this changes what lands on your phone tomorrow. A Kyiv centre taken down in July had pulled more than 500,000 dollars out of dozens of Americans, and the scripts these places work from are the same everywhere: a bank calling about a suspicious payment, a broker with an opportunity, a helpful voice that needs you to install something first. Hang up and dial the number printed on your card. If a caller did talk their way onto your computer, Tendvane's safety check will show you the remote-access software they left behind.