Adviser to the Albanian Minister of Defense, Amant Josifi has been named by a joint investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and a number of European news outlets as the owner of a call center in Albania that is embroiled in an international scam.
Branded an “industrial-scale fraud operation” by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that broke the story, it says that there have been thousands of victims around the world.
Thanks to a whistleblower who revealed a tranche of documents, the nefarious and predatory operations of the Milton Group were unearthed. Perpetrators of systematic Bitcoin fraud that has hit Sweden and the rest of the world, the company claims to be a finance company but the investments are fake and the victims never see a penny of their investment ever again.
Their head office is located in Kiev, Ukraine and Milton’s CEO Jakol Keslemen travels the world, posting pictures of himself with expensive cars and weapons. The ultimate beneficial owner is a man from Georgia who is basically invisible except for his name appearing on official documents. It is another Georgian man with Israeli citizenship- David Todua- who is the real owner.
Todua is usually accompanied by armed bodyguards carrying automatic weapons, and at the companies Christmas party he told staff he wanted to hit $100 million in revenue during 2020. His social media posts include photos of him with a gold Kalashnikov, firing guns, and living the luxury life. He was also arrested in June 2018 in Ukraine when he was stopped at the airport with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, for which he received a fine as punishment.
Also in attendance at this glitzy party was Josifi who appears in a photo Todua posted on social media, showing him posing for a cosy group photo with a plethora of Todua’s bodyguards. Not only is he clearly on good terms with Todua and involved with Milton Group due to his presence at the event, but it has been revealed that he owns a call center in Tirana.
An undercover reporter was able to film senior Milton Group employees coming out of Josifi’s premises in Tirana where they allegedly run the scam from. Andrii Romanko who is a close associate of Keselman acts as a site manager for the Albanian call center, as confirmed by Josifi in a response to the OCCRP.
A source in the know at the Albanian call center confirmed that they conduct the same business as the Milton Group in Kiev and they are sent client names and numbers from that location. The call center in Tirana has up to 500 employees aged between 18-25 and they are required to make up to 400 calls a day to get their salary of €300 a month. Those working there speak English, German and Spanish.
Keselmen denied to the OCCRP that his call centers and Milton Group was a scam and he also claimed he doesn’t know David Todua and didn’t attend a company party in Kiev. Todua contradicted this by stating that he attended the party as he was invited by Keselman.
As for Josifi, the advisor to the Albanian Minister of Defense, he claims he left his role in the company and that he is now only a “passive owner” without any involvement. “I am not responsible for the current board of directors of my companies…I have asked management and they firmly deny all charges.”
Exit revealed in another article the way in which big companies exploit Albanian workers to engage them in carrying out illegal call center work. A now-defunct call center in Tirana, set up by a Cypriot Forex company was using bullying, pressure, harassment, and other tactics to trick vulnerable people out of their money. They also refused to allow investors to withdraw their money, instead, competing among themselves who had the least withdrawals.
