More than €16 million has already been taken from people in Latvia by fraudsters this year, according to police figures published on 18 October 2026 by Nekā personīga on TV3. The tally covers only crimes that were reported, and investigators say the true number of victims and losses is likely much higher. Reported fraud and the sums taken have kept rising. Officers describe a pattern in which groups that obtain more money spend more of it on making their schemes harder to spot.
Over several months the programme worked with State Police investigators on interviews and detentions of people linked to the schemes. One case is that of Sergejs, a pensioner who works as a driver and lives with his wife in a Riga neighbourhood. He said a call that appeared to come from the State Social Insurance Agency set off a sequence lasting about two and a half days. Callers later posed as bank cyber-security staff, claimed loans had been taken in his name at Latvian and foreign non-bank lenders for €25,000, and pressed him to follow their instructions. He later realised the list described borrowing the criminals planned to take, not loans that already existed.
Contact continued in WhatsApp, including a video call in which the other side kept the camera off. More than €11,000 from those loans arrived in his account. He was told this was part of an investigation and that the money would be returned. He was also persuaded to place his bank card in an Omniva locker said to have been reserved for SEB. The next morning nearly €4,500 was withdrawn from cash machines. When he asked about it, the fake bank staff repeated that it was part of the investigation.
The real SEB bank, seeing the suspicious flow, blocked the account and the card. The callers then told him to close the account entirely and send the remaining sum, just under €7,000, through a parcel locker. His wife and son, unable to persuade him he was inside a fake scheme, called the police. Investigators met him at the bank, where he had gone to close the account. He said he still did not believe it on Thursday, or even when police led him out on Friday, and that the callers had kept him under pressure for about three days, including two days they described as rest, before a Monday appointment to withdraw the remaining cash.
Because not all of the money had been taken, the State Police Cybercrime Combating Department passed the case to investigators at the Pārdaugava precinct. They agreed with the bank that when Sergejs collected what remained he would be given an empty envelope, and officers would follow the parcel. On Monday at lunchtime he left an SEB branch in Riga, called the fraudsters, and travelled by trolleybus toward Iļģuciems with two investigators nearby. The phone line stayed open so the callers could hear what was happening around him; he wrote updates on paper.
The callers asked him to lay out each banknote, photograph the serial numbers and send the pictures, a demand officers said they had not met in earlier operations of this kind. To gain time, investigators had him tell the callers that his phone had fallen and the camera was broken and that he was going to buy a new device, while police brought cash. After the images were sent, he was told to leave the envelope in an Omniva locker near his home. Officers watched the locker and contacted Omniva.
After a long wait, two young men approached. They were detained. They later said they had arrived in Latvia a few days earlier, live in Ukraine, and had found a Telegram offer to collect a parcel and pass it on. The envelope was supposed to go to another locker at the Akropole supermarket. Investigators decided not to continue the operation, saying that following money mules and the envelope through the store would need more planning. The programme reported that it still did not learn where Sergejs’s money was meant to end up, or who had defrauded him.
Sergejs is one of more than 1,375 residents of Latvia recorded as defrauded this year. Police figures for reported cases put the losses at a little over €16 million in 2024, €23.7 million in 2025, and already more than €16 million in the first nine months of this year.
Solvita Sļadze, deputy head of Division 2 at the Cybercrime Combating Department, said the organised groups involved are well resourced and put money into their own tools and into technology that helps them impersonate others more convincingly. Phone fraud through dedicated call centres remains the most common scheme. Police have shut several such centres in recent years, including one found in Riga in 2022, where the investigation is still open. In the spring, with Ukrainian colleagues, they stopped a call centre in Kharkiv whose staff also targeted people in Latvia. The people who took money from Sergejs are thought likely to be working in a call centre in another country; such centres can employ more than 100 people.
Sļadze said one fraud can involve many jurisdictions at once: a call centre in one country, victims in another, data hosting elsewhere, and people and shell companies used for laundering in still other places, sometimes about ten countries that must exchange evidence. Taking the money is only the first stage. After that it has to be laundered into ordinary circulation. She said many people are brought in so the funds do not stay with the victim or with an intermediary who might keep them, including professional launderers, large numbers of money mules, and shell firms with fictitious directors. Cryptoassets are used at some stage, while the usual aim is cash, because a withdrawal from an ATM is where the trail often ends.
She also said laundering has become more expensive. Fraudsters previously kept about 60 percent and paid about 40 percent to have the money laundered; a larger share now goes to the greater number of intermediaries. Couriers, as with the two men who were detained, are often recruited in Telegram channels for sums in the tens or hundreds of euros to carry a parcel from one point to another. Sometimes the parcel comes directly from the victim. There have been cases in which the victim or a relative called the police before the money was handed to a courier.