Three people from Omiš and Split have been left without more than €170,000 in three separate online scams reported by the Split-Dalmatia police on Monday, and the single heaviest blow landed on the crypto scene: between July 21 and August 27, a Split resident fed more than €142,000 in cash into crypto ATMs for a fake crypto investment agency called HCM, convinced he was investing in his own future. Instead of portfolio growth, he met a cast of characters that would have left even Frank Abagnale speechless — brokers, lawyers, supposed representatives of the UK tax authority, a Swiss bank and a capital-payout insurance agency, each ready to play their part down to the last euro.
A five-act performance with zero payouts
It all began innocently enough — an ad on an internet portal that the Split resident came across in July. Following a link, he reached the HCM agency’s website and left his personal and contact details, which in the world of fake investment schemes is the digital equivalent of wheeling a Trojan horse through the city gates, except this one hid not in wood but in a browser. Calls and emails soon followed: people posing as brokers promised steady growth of the invested money, and when “additional steps” were needed, the supporting cast stepped in — lawyers, alleged representatives of the UK tax authority, a Swiss bank and an insurance agency handling the “release of capital”.
The script is as old as the internet itself, but the execution was polished: every stage of the story demanded a new payment, and every payment produced a new excuse. The victim followed instructions, using contact numbers and codes supplied by the interlocutors, and between July 21 and August 27 deposited more than €142,000 in cash through crypto ATMs. A criminal investigation is under way, and the perpetrators are, as almost always in such cases, for now just unknown people on the other side of the screen.
When an SMS costs more than a year of rent
The crypto fraud was not the only case on the police desk. The first criminal complaint was filed in Omiš against an unknown person over a computer fraud in which a 34-year-old man was defrauded of more than €13,000. About a month ago, an SMS arrived on his phone claiming he needed to update the mobile banking app of OTP banka, and — as the pinnacle of persuasiveness — the message even included a code for “reactivating the app”. He followed the instructions and later discovered that €13,000 had been drained from his account. Phishing on Croatian soil works just as flawlessly as the global version: one click and one official-sounding message are enough for a bank account to shed weight faster than contestants on a televised diet show.
Oil, gold and crypto: the ad that cost €14,000
The second complaint came from the Omiš area, where a 42-year-old man, after spotting an ad for investing in trading in oil, gold and cryptocurrencies, made several payments totalling just over €14,000 between June 1 and August 28. The promised profit never materialised, and the money did not come back either as a payout or as an apology. That case illustrates how classic investment bait — black gold and precious metals, symbols of stability from past centuries — has seamlessly merged with the crypto narrative into a modern cocktail of lures that catches victims of every generation.
Why crypto ATMs became the fraudster’s favourite tool
The most intriguing question in the whole story is not who, but how: why crypto ATMs? The answer is as simple as the offside rule — once money crosses into crypto, it is practically gone. Cash fed into a crypto ATM is instantly converted into digital assets and sent to addresses that are difficult to link to the perpetrators, and transactions on decentralised networks have no undo button and no bank chargeback. For scammers, it is the perfect mechanism: instead of dealing with bank transfers that banks can freeze or investigate, they get clean cash converted into crypto within minutes. Compared with a classic wire transfer, a crypto ATM is for them like the secret passage in a heist movie — fast, anonymous and off the radar of conventional banking oversight.
The irony is that part of the public spent years viewing crypto ATMs as a fun gateway into the world of digital assets — a place to drop in a banknote and wait for bitcoin to fly to the moon. This case shows the darker side of the coin: the very same machines, in the hands of organised groups, become a channel through which tens of thousands of euros vanish without a trace faster than the Ocean’s Eleven crew emptied a Las Vegas casino. Police can investigate, track and search, but every passing day reduces the chances of recovery — in the world of crypto transactions, money is like a commuter in the subway: once it moves away, the trail goes cold.
Regulation has limits; fraud has none
The case arrives as Croatia counts its first full months under the MiCA regime, following July 1, when the transitional period ended and all unlicensed crypto services became illegal. In the meantime, HANFA has licensed four domestic providers — Electrocoin, Bitblock, Digital Assets and White Tech — and its supervision showed its teeth in the case of Varaždin-based FIMA Plus, which was banned from operating and ordered to return client assets. But this week’s frauds are a reminder of an uncomfortable truth: the fake HCM agency in Split, like the fake brokers in other stories, asks no one for a licence. They operate from across borders, often beyond the reach of Croatian regulators, using advertising, fake platforms and the human desire for quick money.
HANFA and the police therefore routinely repeat warnings that sound like old-fashioned common sense: check any provider against HANFA’s registers before sending a single euro, distrust every story about “guaranteed” returns, and treat any demand for additional payments — under the guise of taxes, legal fees or “payout insurance” — as a blazing red flag. In the Split resident’s case, the cast extracted money in precisely that order: first the promise of growth, then fictitious costs he had to cover to “release” his capital. It is classic Ponzi logic dressed in modern clothing, the kind the world has seen from Charles Ponzi in the 1920s to Netflix documentaries about crypto empires collapsing overnight.
Three warnings in a single week
What makes this news especially worrying is the timing: three complaints, three different methods — SMS phishing, a fake investment ad and a sophisticated multi-stage fraud routed through crypto ATMs — all within days of each other, all in two Dalmatian towns. The figures speak for themselves: €170,000 is roughly the price of an apartment in Split, and this year that much money was “invested” straight into the pockets of unknown perpetrators. Police are searching for the culprits in all three cases, and criminal investigations are under way.
The conclusion that imposes itself like the chorus of every such story: technology changes, tools change — from bank transfers to fake platforms to crypto ATMs — but human gullibility remains as constant as gravity. The Croatian crypto scene is professionalising faster than ever, with licensed platforms, regulatory oversight and increasingly serious players, yet the grey zone keeps thriving precisely because the easiest prey sits outside its borders. While the regulatory framework chases domestic players, global acting troupes continue their tour — and the only ticket victims pay for, as the Split case shows, can cost more than €142,000.