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Following an 11-day trial “conducted under heightened security measures,” a German court on Thursday sentenced a central figure in a massive call center scam operation previously exposed by OCCRP.

The Bamberg Regional Court in Bavaria announced a sentence of seven years and six months due to two counts of commercial and organized fraud. 

The court’s announcement did not name the person sentenced. However, an OCCRP reporter who visited the court prior to the hearings photographed a schedule that matched the time and date of the sentencing in the case. 

The hearing schedule also cited the same charges included in the court’s announcement. And the schedule identified the same judge, with the surname Götz, who was named in the announcement.

The hearing schedule identified the man on trial as Mikheil Biniashvili, who is a citizen of both Georgia and Israel, according to the indictment. 

The verdict is not yet final, and Biniashvili retains the right to appeal. His lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment.

The court found that between January 2017 and May 2019, Biniashvili ran a scam call-center operation based in Albania that at its peak employed up to 600 people, including “specially trained personnel who misled numerous individuals.” 

The court announcement said that after victims registered online for a fraudulent investment scheme, the employees contacted them by phone and “personal trust was immediately built in order to persuade them to ‘invest’ as large sums of money as possible.”

According to the court’s announcement, “the presiding judge at the regional court, Götz, stated in his oral explanation of the verdict that the victims had been ‘lied to through the nose,’ as the funds obtained through the deposits were never invested but simply pocketed.”

The court found that deposits made by victims — primarily in German-speaking countries — resulted in losses of about 8 million euros ($9.4 million). It attributed an additional 42 million euros ($49.5 million) in damages to Biniashvili’s role in supplying software to other fraudulent operations. 

“Entire savings were lost, and entire livelihoods were destroyed,” the court said.

Biniashvili was also responsible for creating and supplying specialized software that underpinned the scam. After leaving the Albanian call center, he went on to sell the software to other criminal groups, allowing the fraud model to be replicated elsewhere, the court said.

In 2020, OCCRP reported on a network of call centers spanning Georgia, Albania and Ukraine, which employed large teams of salespeople to pitch bogus investments to victims worldwide. While the call centers used different brand names with customers, they were known internally as Milton Group in Ukraine and Morgan Limited in Georgia.

Another Georgia-based scam call center exposed last year in OCCRP’s “Scam Empire” investigation utilized a “customer relationship management” software called PumaTS to track its engagement with potential victims. The same software is also named in Biniashvili’s indictment. 

The indictment states that he “provided IT services, namely the PumaTS software, to fraudulent call centers. Through these acts, the accused enriched himself considerably at the expense of his victims.”

Alongside the prison sentence, the court ordered the seizure of 2.4 million euros ($2.8 million) in proceeds linked to the fraud. Biniashvili admitted his role in the operation, according to the court statement.

“The defendant had fully confessed as part of a plea agreement during the main hearing and apologized to the victims in his final statement,” the court said.

On Sunday, February 22, the streets of the Mexican city of Puebla were bustling with costumed carnival dancers when word spread that one of the country’s most powerful organized crime leaders, “El Mencho,” had been killed in a shootout with the military around 800 kilometers away.

Within minutes, social media was flooded with shocking reports and images: El Mencho’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (known by the Spanish acronym CJNG) erecting hundreds of roadblocks and setting fire to vehicles; a passenger plane, banks, businesses, supermarkets, fuel stations and a church torched; gunmen taking over Guadalajara airport. 

In Puebla, a rumor of a shooting and a burning vehicle sparked panic. People hid behind shuttered market stalls and the carnival was abandoned. 

“We all ran to our homes to hide,” said Mariana Ávila, who had come down to the neighborhood to watch the dancers.

But while it was true that highways were blocked and cars were burning in 20 of Mexico’s 31 states, not all the chaos was real. 

Whereas two decades ago the CJNG may have hung a banner on an overpass to spread their message, online trolls connected to organized crime syndicates now use a mixture of spectacle and disinformation to pump fear straight into people’s phones.

The cartel’s online response to the killing of their boss, whose real name was Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, was the most powerful example yet of how propaganda — and disinformation — can be spread by social media accounts that experts believe to be linked to Mexican criminal syndicates. 

According to Alberto Escorcia, a Mexican journalist specializing in disinformation and artificial intelligence, it is common for these accounts to share fake, misleading, or AI-generated images of violence alongside real ones.

“It was amplified to appear as though the whole country was on fire, and the truth is that it wasn’t,” Escorcia said.

The gunfire in Puebla turned out to be a false alarm, as was the claim that armed men had taken over Guadalajara airport. 

A widely shared photo of a burned-out passenger plane on a runway was debunked as fake, as was another of the main church ablaze in the beach resort of Puerto Vallarta. 

In the southern city of Mérida, an alert from the public transport authority announcing that services had been suspended also turned out to be bogus.

Escorcia immediately traced a significant number of these false images back to three X accounts that, through his years of research, he believes are connected to the cartel. 

“What the Jalisco Cartel trolls do is generate a critical mass. They know how to game the Twitter [X] algorithm,” Escorcia told OCCRP. 

Mexico’s security minister Omar Garcia Harfuch said authorities were investigating whether organized crime was behind “numerous” online accounts they had identified as “spreading lies” during the crisis.

More opportunistic accounts not linked to crime groups, including right-wing handles in Mexico and the United States, also fanned the flames, circulating the images and messages further afield.

The Evolution of Narco Propaganda 

When President Felipe Calderón launched the so-called “war on drugs” in 2006, the primary way that organized crime groups communicated with the broader public was by hanging large banners known as “narcomantas” from overpasses or in other highly visible public spaces. Journalists would then flock to the sites to photograph and report on the banners, spreading the messages of the crime groups far and wide.

“Narcomantas worked really effectively [in the age of] print and TV,” said Philip Luke Johnson, a political scientist and professor at Flinders University in Australia who studies how organized groups communicate with the public. 

By the end of the decade, Mexican criminal groups had moved online to broadcast announcements such as the imposition of curfews on towns they controlled, or gory videos of beheadings and torture. 

Meanwhile, dedicated narco blogs and webpages maintained by anonymous citizen journalists flourished, helping fill the information void in areas that were simply too dangerous for local reporters to cover.

The 2023 emergence of a video showing five kidnapped teenagers — one forced to murder his friend — marked a horrific watershed in the weaponization of digital content. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for the brutality or uploading it, but it sent shockwaves across the country.

“That was when journalists were saying that [their job shouldn’t be] just going around finding narcomantas on fences anymore,” Johnson says. “[Propaganda] gets into people’s inboxes, it gets on WhatsApp, where it spreads more rapidly and organically.”

One early incident of disinformation about narco violence translating into real-world terror was in September 2012, when videos circulated on social media showing scenes of mass hysteria in different parts of greater Mexico City. 

“These incidents were fueled by rumors that armed members of the Familia Michoacana cartel, traveling in pickup trucks, were attacking businesses and firing shots into the air,” said Paloma Mendoza-Cortes, a senior analyst at PHLX Consulting. 

The rumors led to the suspension of classes in some schools, and residents even claimed that a curfew had been imposed, which never actually happened, she said.

Cartel messaging is most effective when there are few other sources to rely on.

As the events unfolded on Sunday, the government provided little clear information, allowing disinformation, misinformation and AI imagery to pour into the vacuum.

Mexico’s security ministry posted on X that Jalisco State’s commercial centers were unaffected by the outbreak of violence, just as malls were announcing that they had closed over security concerns. 

In Puebla, where roadblocks had appeared on highways, the state government claimed that schools would be closed only because of “strong winds.”

Burning Roadblocks

While the photo of Puerto Vallarta’s burning church had been created by Google Gemini, an AI platform, other images of the city engulfed by columns of black smoke from the vehicles that CJNG members set ablaze were real.

Setting up fiery roadblocks is by now a well-trodden tactic used by Mexican criminal groups to get public attention and make a scene .

These “narcobloqueos” were pioneered by the now-fractured Zeta Cartel around the same time as the criminal groups moved online, in the early 2010s. Other groups quickly adopted the tactic. 

The CJNG, for example, brought Guadalajara traffic to a standstill in 2012 by blocking roads with burning vehicles after Mexican authorities arrested another of its leaders.

(The cartel later hung up a narcomanta apologizing to the population for the inconvenience, claiming that the blockade was simply pushback against the government for interfering in cartel business.)

They’re designed to “impact the biggest arteries to get the maximum effect”, said Johnson. “Everyone in the city feels it because it’s peak hour, and nothing is moving. [But] you’re not immediately in danger a lot of the time.”

Cheap and easy to pull off, they require no more than a small team with firearms and a gas canister to ambush a car or truck, force the driver out, and set it alight. But their impact can be significant. 

“The central objective of the narco roadblocks is to hinder the security deployment in a city, so that forces can’t arrive to help whoever’s in charge of an operation, such as capturing a criminal leader,” says Víctor Manuel Sánchez Valdés, a security researcher and professor at the University of Coahuila.

“At the end of the day, it’s impactful to see an avenue in your city that you transit every day blocked, and that they set fire to a vehicle on it. It creates fear, right? A collective fear,” said Sánchez Valdés.

This is exactly the tactic used by the CJNG’s rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel, on October 17, 2019, when Mexican armed forces captured the son of its former leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, in the city of Culiacán. 

The cartel’s fierce response, which involved not just roadblocks but also arson, shootouts, and the dissemination of both real and fake videos, forced the president to order the immediate release of El Chapo’s son.

The battle became known as the ‘Culiacanazo,’ and made news around the world. “It’s using the people to make the government squirm,” said Johnson.

Mendoza-Cortes said the event “was interpreted as a major victory for organized crime against the federal government, and other cartels imitated this behavior.”

For many in Mexico, the Culiacanazo loomed large when the CJNG responded to El Mencho’s killing.

“It was like a Culiacanazo at the national level,” said Escorcia.

Force Multiplier

Even though Mexicans are by now accustomed to narcobloqueos, the scale and coordination of last week’s roadblocks was unprecedented. 

In the 2019 Culiacanazo, the Sinaloa Cartel erected around 20 roadblocks, Sánchez Valdés said. On Sunday, the CJNG set up 252 across 20 different states, according to the government’s security agency.

“I think that was the objective,” said Sánchez Valdés. “Get attention at the same time as creating fear, and try to do it in the largest number of cities and places possible.”

When the message is fear, taking violence viral acts like a force multiplier.

Sunday’s havoc left 42 alleged cartel members and 25 national guardsmen dead, according to the government.

For now, however, only one civilian appears to have been killed across the country, a pregnant woman caught in the path of a shoot-out in the city of Zapopan.

Given the cartel’s proven capacity for indiscriminate murder, the Instagram-ready unrest was a quick and effective show of strength.

Unlike the Culiacanazo, in which the criminal group had a clear tactical goal —  to free their leader’s son —  CJNG created turmoil after their leader had been killed, making it appear more like a retaliatory public relations campaign.

In Puebla and other cities across the country, the group’s hybrid warfare — blending real-world violence with digital tactics — triggered a wave of national panic.

“They said they’d set fire to one of the dance troupe’s trucks,” said Ávila, the woman in Puebla who had come to watch the carnival. “All the troupes stopped dancing…. We went into a sort of psychosis.”

As with many previous instances of law enforcement using the “kingpin strategy” to take down the leader of an organized crime group, a far more deadly reaction to El Mencho’s killing could yet unfold.

“Even though it looks like what was happening on Sunday was ‘You kill a leader and there’s immediately all this violence,’ the weekend was not the intense version of it,” said Johnson. 

“The intense version of it will be if, over months in different areas that Jalisco control, there are these turf wars where things get really violent.”

Six months after the protests driven by fury over entrenched corruption toppled Nepal’s elected government, political parties are now campaigning for the March 5 general elections with a shared message: each claims to be the best choice to curb graft. 

Their proposals span sweeping asset investigations of senior officials, the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption, and – in one case – a call to reinstate the death penalty for major offenses, despite the country having abolished capital punishment in 1990.

And it is the same parties that were targets of the protests that are now touting themselves as champions of integrity. But many of those who took part in the demonstrations — sparked by a ban on social media and fueled by anger over endemic corruption — remain skeptical that the current crop of candidates will deliver real reform.

“They say they will investigate corruption, but we aren’t sure if they will totally implement this,” said 25-year-old Rakesh Kumar Mahato, who was shot in the spine during the protests and remains paralyzed.

Since September, the country has been under an interim government led by former Chief Justice of Nepal Sushila Karki. She moved the general election forward nearly two years ahead of schedule in response to the youth-led Gen Z movement.

It is the first time on the election rolls for 915,000 youth among the 8.9 million voters eligible to cast a ballot for the 275-member House of Representatives.

But the young protestors who shook the foundations of Nepal’s establishment are not widely represented in the contest. According to Election Commission of Nepal data, candidates below the age of 30 account for just 5.6 percent of those standing for office.

For its part, the Election Commission has this year introduced stricter transparency rules, requiring all campaign expenses to flow through dedicated bank accounts. Any donation higher than Rs. 25,000 ($172.50) must be deposited directly into those accounts, and donors of larger sums must provide tax identification numbers.

This seeks to address a clear place for reform. A Nepal Investigative Multimedia Journalism Network investigation last year revealed that political parties had evaded taxes, submitted statements of income and expenditure that were lower than the actual figures, and systematically flouted donation disclosure laws.

Yet a pre-election assessment by the Asian Network for Free and Fair Elections found the new political finance rules had “weak enforcement and minimal deterrence, reinforcing a perception that expenditure limits do not meaningfully constrain the real campaign economy.” This risked vote-buying, patronage and inducements and also keeping out marginalized candidates, concluded the assessment.

When interviewed by OCCRP, Nepali human rights defenders also questioned whether the major political parties were committed to following finance rules.

“What’s lacking is internal transparency,” National Human Rights Commission Secretary

Murari Prasad Kharel said. “Will these leaders disclose their own assets? How will they manage internal party governance?”

Activists, voters, and election observers also questioned the lack of specific proposals on how political parties would carry out their anti-corruption strategies.

“Forming a commission is not enough if they lack an implementation strategy,” former Acting

Auditor General Shukdev Bhattarai Khatri said. “We have seen two dozen commissions and committees in 70 years to investigate corruption … Their reports are buried.”

Widespread anger over that kind of inaction triggered last year’s protests, in which more than 2,000 were injured and 77 killed, many of them shot by security forces. Amid the violence, crowds burned a number of buildings, including the Supreme Court and parliament itself.

As the March 5 vote nears, security remains a concern. Following reports of clashes between rival party members, interim premier Karki has ordered security agencies to remain on high alert.

The most watched race is in the constituency of Jhapa 5, where four-time Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli — forced to resign during the September uprising — is fighting for his political survival against Balendra Shah.

Shah, a rapper and former Mayor of Kathmandu, recently joined the Rastriya Swatantra Party to challenge the “old guard” on their home turf. While there is no official opinion polling for elections in Nepal, his new party is widely considered the frontrunner.

In his election commitment letter, Balen pledged to “raise strong voices against irregularities and corruption.”

In his own commitment letter, former PM Oli pledges that if his Communist Party of Nepal is re-elected again, this time will be different. 

“In the past, when our party was in government, we started the work of curbing corruption and made some progress,” the letter said. “Zero tolerance will be adopted in curbing corruption.”

Four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many people are trying to overcome deep-rooted trauma and rebuild what has been lost. 

South Sudan was the focus of debate in the UN Human Rights Council on Friday as escalating violence and political tensions – alongside a massive humanitarian emergency and war in neighbouring Sudan – threaten efforts to achieve lasting peace. 

Reports on Friday that major cities in Afghanistan have been bombed by the Pakistan military in a new escalation between the two countries have raised fears for civilians already struggling under the harsh rule of the de facto Taliban authorities.