The Prosecutor’s Office and the Interior Ministry have announced the launch of a large-scale national campaign against telephone scams, whose victims are, more often than not, elderly people.

At a meeting dedicated to the problem, Deputy Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev declared that this problem has always been approached in a  piecemeal manner. Prosecutor General Sotir Tsatsarov stated that what is needed is a systematic approach, good connections with foreign services and prevention.

In 2018 alone phone scammers defrauded victims of 4 million euro. Telephone scams first appeared in Bulgaria in the late 1990s, their numbers soaring after 2005.