Inside Ukraine's shadow call-centre economy and the war's longest tail

On 26 June 2026, the Russian-aligned Telegram channel Two Majors posted a claim that, if read literally, would reframe one of the less-examined fronts of the war in Ukraine. Thousands of fraudulent call centres, the channel said, operate on Ukrainian territory, using number spoofing and sham investment platforms to extract money from people worldwide — and the situation, in the channel's blunt phrasing, "is no longer a matter of is." The post carried no count, no addresses, no Ukrainian municipal or law-enforcement attribution. It carried a political point.

The temptation is to dismiss the claim because of its messenger. Two Majors is a Russian milblogger channel whose reporting tracks closely with the framing priorities of the Russian defence establishment. In a war where Ukrainian sovereignty is the settled legal premise, claims sourced to such channels sit, by default, on the lower rungs of the evidence ladder. But the underlying industry Two Majors gestures at is not invented. It has been documented for years, and the structural conditions of full-scale war have almost certainly accelerated it.

A documented industry, repackaged for propaganda

Ukrainian and international reporting has, for the better part of a decade, recorded the operation of so-called "boiler rooms" — staffed call centres that cold-call victims abroad, impersonate brokers or tax authorities, and walk targets through fictitious investments or fake refunds. The pattern is familiar enough that the FBI, the UK's National Crime Agency, and Europol have all run public operations naming Ukrainian-based networks as among the most prolific globally. Those operations predate 2022 and have continued through the invasion, in part because the legal apparatus around them has been disrupted by wartime conditions, and in part because the revenue they generate is denominated in foreign currency that is unusually liquid inside a war economy.

What Two Majors adds to this record is a number — "thousands" — and a geographic claim that the call centres function with relative impunity inside Ukraine. Neither is verifiable from the post itself. The figure does not correspond to any public tally from Ukrainian police, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the National Police of Ukraine, or any Western partner agency that this publication could cross-reference. The geographic claim is closer to consensus: international reporting has long placed a significant share of European-targeted boiler-room operations in Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv and Dnipro. The leap from "documented presence" to "thousands operating freely" is the rhetorical work the channel is doing.

Why the wartime economy bends toward fraud

The structural conditions Two Majors either cannot or will not name are the more useful part of the story. Ukraine's wartime labour market has absorbed hundreds of thousands of men into the armed forces, displaced a comparable number of civilians, and hollowed out parts of the civilian economy that would, in peacetime, employ a young, urban, multilingual workforce with exactly the skills a call-centre operation demands: fluent English or German, comfort on a script, willingness to work anti-social hours, and tolerance for morally ambiguous work. A call-centre job, in this market, does not pay a defence-sector salary, but it pays in euros and dollars, often in cash, often off the books. For some workers, that calculation is dispositive.

A second structural factor is enforcement. Ukrainian cybercrime and financial-fraud units have not disappeared, but their priorities, personnel, and infrastructure have been reoriented toward the invasion. The European scam that targets a retiree in Stuttgart is a low-priority case in a system now oriented toward state survival. That reordering of police attention is not a justification; it is a description of how triage works in a country at war. The Two Majors post weaponises the description.

The Russian counter-frame, taken seriously

Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether Two Majors' specific number is real. The framing the channel advances — that Ukraine tolerates or even benefits from fraud against Western civilians — is not, in its bare structural form, novel. It rhymes with long-running Russian talking points about Western sanctions enforcement (which Russia argues is selective and politically motivated), with rhetoric around Western financial institutions' own fraud histories (Wirecard, FTX, the LIBOR scandal, the various crypto exchange collapses), and with a broader argument about the moral symmetry of the post-2014 sanctions regime. Read in that light, the post is less an intelligence bulletin than a political artefact: an attempt to insert Ukraine into a category — "state that profits from harming Westerners" — that has, until now, been reserved for the Kremlin's adversaries.

A serious reading grants the framing two things. First, that the boiler-room industry is real, is partly Ukrainian-resident, and does inflict measurable harm on victims in the EU, the UK, and North America. Second, that wartime conditions have degraded the Ukrainian state's capacity to police that industry. Both points are independently sourced. What the framing elides is the third part: that Ukraine's partners in the EU and the UK have, for the better part of a decade, run joint operations against these networks, and that those operations have continued to surface Ukrainian nationals as defendants. The fraud is a problem of policing capacity under wartime conditions, not a problem of Ukrainian state complicity.

Stakes and what remains uncertain

The stakes, if the Two Majors framing gains traction in Western discourse, are not trivial. A narrative that recasts Ukraine as a permissive environment for fraud against Western civilians would sit alongside, and arguably reinforce, existing political pressure in some EU and US constituencies to reduce aid. It would also give the Kremlin a clean rhetorical move: any future scandal involving a Ukrainian-resident fraud network could be pre-loaded with the suggestion that Kyiv has been forewarned and has done nothing. The mechanics of that argument do not require the "thousands" figure to be true. They require only that the figure be repeated often enough to feel familiar.

What remains genuinely uncertain, after this post, is the actual scale. The Two Majors claim is unsupported by any Ukrainian or Western law-enforcement release this publication could verify. The boiler-room industry itself is well-documented and geographically dispersed; placing it almost entirely inside Ukraine is the channel's editorial choice, not a corroborated finding. The most defensible reading is the unspectacular one: wartime economic stress and reduced enforcement capacity have made Ukraine a more comfortable operating environment for fraud networks than it was before 2022, just as they have made Ukraine a more comfortable operating environment for legitimate businesses fleeing the front. The category of activity has not changed. The marginal cost of doing it has.

This publication has chosen to report the claim as a political artefact, not as a fact. The underlying industry warrants reporting on its own terms, with sourcing from Ukrainian police and Western partner agencies — not with the channel that is, today, amplifying it.

Desk note: Monexus treats the Two Majors post as a low-tier claim whose underlying industry is real and independently documented; the piece steers the framing away from the channel's editorial line and toward the verifiable wartime-economy context.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/two_majors
• https://www.europol.europa.eu/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_room_(business)
• https://www.fbi.gov/