We look not for people, but for what they have hidden.
The stories presented in the series “The Detective Investigates” are based on real cases investigated by Hayk Gabrielyan, Chairman of the Association of Private Detectives of Armenia, and Gabrielyan & Partners Detective Bureau, Armenia’s only officially registered private detective organisation. Every Friday, Aravot publishes the detective’s extraordinary findings.
A detective’s working morning begins with the aroma of a cup of coffee and checking email to pleasant jazz on the radio. A letter from the head of the security department of a company in the Forbes top five looked, for a moment, like it had been sent by scammers. The kind of email your professional instinct tells you to delete: what business could such a company have with us? But an inner voice told me to read it anyway.
And the inner voice was right: they had indeed approached Gabrielyan & Partners Detective Bureau. The request concerned 25 Armenians. They had opened verified accounts on the company’s platform and, on that basis, seller pages. Through these pages, fraud schemes had been launched. Their verified accounts had become an operational tool for fraud. Orders were placed and money came in, but the sales chain was never completed. The buyers received nothing. The security department passed on all the information: photos, passport details, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and the IP addresses used to log in. Our colleagues asked us to investigate and uncover the full chain of fraud and how deep it went.
The task was clear, but behind it lay the fate of 25 Armenians. We started meeting them one by one. They were different people — in age, education and occupation. But they all had one thing in common: severe financial hardship. Some had loans to repay, some were temporarily unemployed, and some simply hadn’t understood what they were agreeing to for the 10,000 drams offered in Telegram groups.
The most shocking meeting was with a young woman. She sat in front of us, frightened, her eyes wet. She had no home of her own and lived with relatives. But when we opened the account in her name at a Kazakh bank, a figure flashed on the screen that seemed fantastical against the backdrop of her life: USD 100,000.
“Do you know there is a hundred thousand dollars in your name?” I asked quietly.
She just looked at me, and tears ran down her face.
“Mr. Gabrielyan, I don’t even have money for bread today… They told me it was just a page…”
At that moment I felt the bitter contradiction at the heart of this case. For the fraudsters it was “just a page”; for this young woman it was the prospect of a ruined life.
The trail led us to Kazakhstan. There were no direct flights from Yerevan to Almaty. We drove to Tbilisi and flew to Kazakhstan from there at dawn. In the cabin, Gagik and I discussed the case openly without whispering — we were the only Armenians on board. We knew that what awaited us there was not just questions but real action. At the airport we were met by our respected colleague Rustam Mirzabaev, the best private investigator in Kazakhstan. But the real operational support came from Gagik’s old friend Serik. They had been friends since their police days, and now Serik headed one of Kazakhstan’s units fighting organised crime. When they saw each other, time seemed to stop for a moment. It was that silent respect between professionals that is built over years of working together.
The raid took place that very night. In the cold, foggy suburbs of Almaty, Serik’s unit, acting on information provided by us and Rustam, surrounded the office from which the Armenian accounts were being run. It was a technical “lab” full of computers and communications equipment. The operation looked like a scene from a real detective film: smashed doors, handcuffed detainees and dozens of computers still switched on, the Armenian seller pages registered on the platform still visible on their screens… That night we cut out the Kazakh intermediate link.
By combining local resources, technical tracing and operational intelligence, we established that the Kazakh group had not been acting on its own. It was an intermediate link. Interrogations made it clear that ultimate control and coordination lay with criminal clans operating in Myanmar who specialise in running international fraud schemes through call centres (call-center fraud operations). Their model was this: recruit or buy verified accounts all over the world, use them for fraudulent sales or other digital scams, and quickly move the money out through multi-layered transfers. Our client company and other platforms were simply tools for them. The next morning, with Serik’s support, all the information obtained was handed over through official operational channels to the law enforcement authorities of Myanmar for further action. The Kazakh phase of the case ended in victory.
We spent our last evening at the well-known Almaty restaurant Zheti Kazyna (“Seven Treasures”). Around the table: me, Gagik, Rustam and Serik. It wasn’t an official dinner but a gathering of old friends — former and serving senior police officers who had proved once again that professional and officer’s honour knows no borders. We talked about the past days, the schemes we had exposed and the human destinies we had tried to save. The farewell at the airport the next morning was full of friendly longing and the hope of meeting again. Rustam and Serik saw us off like family.
“Brothers, borders exist only on the map. We are always side by side,” said Serik.
On the way back, another surprise awaited us at Tbilisi airport. As soon as we stepped into the arrivals hall, we saw our inseparable Georgian colleague and brother, Shalva Kuprashvili. Knowing about our trip and the difficult case, he had come to the airport to meet us.
“Did you think you’d pass through Georgia without Shalva having breakfast with you?” he exclaimed with his trademark warmth.
We went to Puri Guliani, where, amid the smell of freshly baked bread and the warmth of a Tbilisi morning, we shared our impressions. That breakfast was the perfect end to our difficult journey.
That night, as I switched off the lights in our Yerevan office, I could still see that young woman’s eyes. We had handed all the evidence to the client and exposed the criminal chain, but we had also understood one important thing. In the digital age, people have become very vulnerable. The digital world has changed, but the logic of crime has not. There will always be people who think that deceiving a big system will go unnoticed. But big platforms have a deep institutional memory. And when experienced investigation is added to that memory, invisibility becomes a myth. Crime knows no borders — but neither do responsibility and friendship. And in big games one thing is certain: distance is always deceptive.
Hayk GABRIELYAN
Aravot daily
20.03.2026
Read at the source (in Armenian): A digital trail and human pain