Sweden’s Foreign Minister demands action against Ukrainian BTC scam

The Swedish government is calling for swift action against a BTC scam that has defrauded thousands of victims. The company, known as Milton Group, has especially targeted the elderly in Sweden, stealing millions of dollars from them. And now, the Swedish Foreign Minister has urged Ukraine to investigate the group which has been operating from the city of Kyiv.

The Milton Group was recently exposed by Ukrainian newspaper Dagens Nyheter. As CoinGeek reported, the company claimed to be an IT support firm, but a whistleblower working with the paper exposed it to be an extensive and well-orchestrated BTC scam. It targeted victims in multiple countries, mostly in Europe, with the majority of its victims being from Sweden.

The Minister, Ann Linde, who was speaking during a meeting with high-level Ukrainian officials, expressed her anger at the widespread fraud, especially since it had targeted the elderly. She stated. “It is really upsetting to see how they bluff Swedish retirees who have to leave their homes and live on a minimum subsistence level. And then they sit there, laughing.”

Indeed, the report by Dagens Nyheter revealed how the employees of the Milton Group brag about their scams. One particular staff member, known to his victims as William Bradley, was recorded by the whistleblower bragging about how he had defrauded a man of $150,000. He then convinced the victims, an elderly man, that it was his own fault that the money was lost.

The Minister urged Ukraine to investigate the fraudulent firm which is based in its capital city of Kyiv. “The most important thing is that [the allegations] get attention,” she stated, according to a report by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The Swedish Minister for Digitization and Energy, in a separate event, urged the government to crack down on tech companies for their role in such scams. The Minister, Anders Ygeman, revealed that his office is formulating legislation that will give law enforcement the power to pursue big tech giants. In the Milton Group’s case, for instance, all the victims claimed they were targeted after they clicked on ads about get-rich-quick BTC schemes on Facebook. The Minister believes that Facebook should take responsibility for such activity and its failure in shutting them down.

He stated, “Facebook makes 1.5 billion SEK ($160 million) every year in Sweden from advertising. Therefore they have to be able to guarantee that they don’t have fraudulent adverts which force retirees to leave their homes. If they would work as hard on protecting themselves from false ads as they have on making it possible to direct ads to a specific group, this problem would not exist.”

As CoinGeek reported, Qatari billionaire businessman Wissam Al Mana has sued Facebook for its failure to bring down crypto scams using his image illegally. Al Mana, who is the ex-husband to pop icon Janet Jackson, sued the company in an Irish court.