In Estonia, the organizer of a 100 million scheme will be released to return money to victims 0 4

Of this amount, 5.4 million is intended for compensation to his Estonian victims, while the remaining three million will go to the state treasury. Worldwide, the criminal community defrauded people of nearly 100 million dollars, Eesti Ekspress reported this week.

The prosecutor's office clarified to Postimees that, according to the indictment, Yermolaev was one of four founders and leaders of Ukrainian call centers. His role involved creating and financing companies, as well as organizing operations and providing support for the call centers. The companies under his control provided office space and other services that were used to implement the fraudulent scheme that operated from 2017 to 2022. Victims were misled with allegedly functioning investment platforms to which people transferred their money.

As part of an agreement between the prosecutor's office and Yermolaev, which is likely to be concluded on Thursday, he will be sentenced to five years in prison. However, he will be released immediately after the verdict is announced and expelled from the country for ten years. The probation period will be five years.

In fact, Yermolaev spent five months behind bars after being detained in Cyprus at the end of last year and extradited to Estonia.

According to Hannes Kelt, head of the cyber and economic crime service of the Põhja Prefecture, the police's goal in fraud cases is to reach the organizers.

"We work on this every day and analyze each case to return money lost to fraud to the residents of Estonia. Unfortunately, cases where a fraud victim gets their money back are more of an exception, as money is quickly transferred abroad or into cryptocurrency. There is unfortunately nothing to take from low-level perpetrators, so it is very important for us to catch the organizers of the schemes and the real beneficiaries. This was a very complex criminal network, and we worked with a huge volume of data. So far, we have identified hundreds of victims in Estonia who lost money due to the fraudulent scheme, and we are currently determining how many victims there are in total and what damage was caused to each of them," Kelt explains.

Yermolaev's ability to pay Estonia 8.5 million euros came thanks to the support of his wealthy family. From the perspective of Estonia and its residents, the release of this person for a large sum of money seems logical. Fraud victims will be able to recover their money without further proceedings. If the prosecutor's office had opted for general judicial proceedings, it would likely have led to a lengthy and costly trial with no guarantee that the extensive and detailed indictment would result in a conviction.

Professor of Law at the University of Tartu, Jaan Ginter, also notes that from the perspective of the Estonian state, this decision is reasonable. In addition to the aforementioned reasons, we also avoid the costs of his imprisonment.

However, as Postimees notes, if out of the 100 million obtained through fraud, only five million is allocated to Estonian victims, the question arises: what will happen to victims from other countries?

The article in Eesti Ekspress also states that about a year ago he contacted Ukrainian authorities, but at least for now, there are no signs that he is facing another criminal investigation and possible trial in any other country. Since he will now be released and expelled from Estonia, if any country wishes to detain him, it may prove to be a challenging task.

"But I have no information that any country has requested his extradition," Ginter said.