Going for that Scoop

In late 2019 Czech Television, a public broadcaster, approached our newsroom at investigace.cz with a request to dig deeper into the workings of a retail platform called Discount Club. This platform offered medical products that promised to heal everything from varicose veins to deafness. Its marketing was aimed primarily at the elderly, a socially vulnerable group who believed the allegedly miraculous products would help them. This turned out to be a wishful thinking: the overpriced products were fake.

At the same time, the fraudsters behind the scam were hiding behind a web of companies and offshore firms with obscured ownership. As a result, no one could be held to account. Despite thousands of victims and evidence of fraud, the perpetrators remained unknown to Czech law enforcement, and regulatory bodies were unable to untangle the complex international network of companies behind the scam. I persuaded my editors we should do it ourselves.

After initial research, I started looking into a Panama-based company called Direct Group that allegedly ran the retail platform Discount Club. In cooperation with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s Investigative Dashboard (OCCRP), we came across information that indicated that a Polish businessman from a small village was behind the company. This assumption was corroborated by official records from company registries in Panama, Singapore, Malta and Estonia. At that point, I realised that the story had huge cross-border potential and asked a Polish journalist, Daniel Flis, who helped with the research, to work with me on the story.

After weeks of digging deeper, we established that the scam spanned four continents and had swindled money from thousands of victims in at least ten countries in the EU alone. We decided to uncover the scammers’ operations in Czechia and Poland, compare the victim's experiences, and scrutinize how official bodies were handling the issue. The maximum version of our story was to uncover and describe how the whole system worked internationally.

We started interviewing dozens of victims, experts, state and EU officials, customer rights NGOs, prosecutors and police representatives. In parallel, we tracked down digital traces the fraudsters left behind online through open source intelligence techniques. Putting together the piece of the puzzle, we identified key companies and their roles, and described how they operated in our countries as well as how the scheme worked, starting from advertising to sales, logistics and customer care. After the story was published in Czech, Polish and English in various online and print media it received significant attention from victims, law enforcement and regulatory bodies as well as from the legal team of the perpetrators.

This investigation is a good example of a story that directly calls for cross-border cooperation, as the core of the scam was evidently international. Had I worked on it by myself in Czechia, I could describe the misery of the deceived pensioners, local legislative shortcomings, and state bodies’ inefficiencies—in short, not much more than what Czech Television and other media had already reported. Turning the story international, by collaborating with the OCCRP and Daniel, allowed us to show how many countries the scam operated in, follow the paper trail in foreign company registries, describe the scheme’s global workings and, most importantly, identify the real perpetrators, as well as compare national perspectives. As the scammers have operated mostly from Poland, Warsaw-based Daniel had the knowledge, skills and insights to report on a professional level that I could never have reached as a Czech with a hired local fixer. In short, this all would not have happened had I worked on it by myself.

Our collaboration was generally smooth, thanks in part to our prior experience with project-based cross-border journalism: we drafted hypotheses and the story outline together, divided the workload, and set up a timeline. We established communication (weekly and ad-hoc Jitsi calls, Slack for sharing new findings and for chatting daily, Google Drive for sharing documents and drafts) and fortified ourselves with patience for sudden changes in deadlines due to work for our respective newsrooms, which have different focuses, working cultures and audiences.

We faced three big challenges in our investigation. First, there was a difference between the time we could dedicate to the project. I could set aside more hours for this project than could my colleague, so I had to take the lead both in coordination and drafting. Second, internal communication with editors in our newsrooms got complicated as their support for the time-consuming investigation gradually ebbed away. Third, the form and timing of the investigation’s publication were complicated due to various differences in our newsroom’s priorities as well upcoming presidential elections in Poland. However, I think we managed to overcome these challenges thanks to our enthusiasm for the project, shared opinions about investigative journalism, and clear and honest communication between the two of us. Importantly, in the end we both agreed the final piece was worth the effort, which is not necessarily always the case (badly planned or executed cross-border investigations can turn into a disaster). The positive result thus left the door open to future collaborations.

The investigation “Online Crooks: Catch Us If You Can” can be accessed in English here.

The initiative for this project came from Israeli journalist Hagar Shezaf, who reached out to me at a Dataharvest conference in 2016. She had worked together with tech correspondent Orr Hirschhauge in Israel and on the West Bank (the Palestinian territory governed by Israeli martial law). The two colleagues had documented and published stories on how Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) used social media platforms to identify young Palestinians with a “terrorist profile.” IDF soldiers would then apprehend the presumed terrorists based on their profiles before any terrorist action or criminal offence had taken place and no such intentions could be proven—a concept known as predictive policing.

Hagar and Orr reached out for European contacts for several reasons. They knew that European authorities and police bodies had demonstrated an interest in predictive policing and wanted to learn how those methods worked in the West Bank. There was a certain twist in the fact that the West Bank is run by Israeli martial law, meaning the armed forces had fewer legal restrictions than inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Innovations in policing on the West Bank could therefore be tested as in a laboratory before they were introduced inside Israel's pre-1967 borders or elsewhere, including Europe.

I was asked to join the project as I had some experience in reporting on justice and home affairs—the EU jargon for policing and anti-terrorism measures. Jennifer Baker, an experienced Irish tech reporter based in Brussels, joined for similar reasons.

Our goal was to find out to what extent the Israeli experience in predictive policing was gaining ground in the EU. Could we prove our original headline: “Facebook arrests—soon based on an account near you”? Yes we could. But for different reasons, this message was not received with the interest we had expected and thought it deserved.

It should be noted that the basic documentation in Israel and on the West Bank was done in 2015-2016 when “social profiling” was not yet as established an issue as it has become since then. It should also be noted that the concept of predictive policing was not an Israeli invention, nor were the techniques and computer programs used. We nevertheless thought that the full-scale application of these techniques on the West Bank, and the interest for such problematic tactics shown by European authorities, would be of interest to European audiences. That was where we were proven wrong.

Our research had received funding from the Journalismfund. We could document that our assumptions were based on facts. There were no attempts to question our conclusions. Nor were we accused of biased reporting. But we failed—or perhaps were less successful—in connecting the European and Israeli/Palestinian aspects of the story.

Despite our shortcomings, the Israeli weekly Haaretz published an extensive version of the piece in Hebrew and English on their website and in their paper. But in both versions the European connection was played down, and focus was put on the Israeli side. The piece in Haaretz was picked up by the London-based news website, Al-Araby. We do not know if it was covered more broadly in other Middle Eastern media outlets.

European outlets showed little interest in our piece. It was seen as a Middle East-story, a conflict area already covered at length. Finally the website EUobserver.com published a version with the two angles knitted nicely together as intended, with reporting added by staff member Nikolaj Nielsen.

Although we were able to prove our assumptions, and had good and balanced reporting from the field, and we could point at attempts to integrate predictive policing in European jurisdictions, the impact of our story did not match the time and energy we put into it. Then again, that feeling was not unfamiliar to any of us involved, or to anyone engaged in investigative journalism.

A summary of the investigation, with links to published articles, can be found here: https://www.journalismfund.eu/how-israel-jails-palestinians

In 2018 I started working on a project to investigate the use of chlorpyrifos, a little-known but hazardous pesticide that was then widely used in the European Union. I conducted my investigation with Nils Mulvad, the head the Investigative Reporting Centre in Denmark, and with journalists from Knack in Belgium, Le Monde in France, Dagbladet in Norway, Newsweek in Poland, Ostro in Slovenia, El Confidential in Spain and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting in the US. Our investigation was supported by a grant from Journalismfund.eu and was published on the 17th of June 2019 in eight different European outlets, including the French daily Le Monde.

Less than six months later, chlorpyrifos was banned by the EU. Our investigation, which had triggered a swift political reaction, thus had the maximum impact we could have hoped for.

Though we can never be sure how much our investigation alone influenced legislators, the producers of the pesticide certainly blamed us for the ban. A representative from one of the firms that produced the pesticide described how the EU “bowed to pressure from NGOs and the media.”

Even if our story had an impact, we stood on the shoulders of scientists who had warned of the dangers of the pesticide back in 1998. Academic peer-reviewed studies showed that chlorpyrifos damages the brain of foetuses and new-born children, directly undermining results from studies paid for and conducted by the agrochemical industry which had shown no such effects. In addition to the work of scientists, NGOs devoted to health and the environment had collected a substantial amount of data on the chemical’s residues in food all over Europe. Finally, we were riding a wave of legislative discussions concerning the insecticide: during our investigation, the American Environmental Protection Agency came close to banning the substance, before the Trump administration walked back on that proposal.

To go about our investigation, our team decided to request data on chlorpyrifos residues in food samples collected by national authorities. The data we got were compared with annual reports compiled by the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA). The quality of the national data we got varied quite a lot, but we learned that the NGO Pesticide Action Network Europe had already done a lot of the work, and with their help we could double check the relevance of our figures with the official data from EFSA.

This cross-verification helped us reach two further conclusions: that the EU-driven reporting system called Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) was of questionable value because alerts about hazardous food samples found in one country were sent out after the same samples had reached retailers (and consumers) in other countries. Second, we showed how the system of approval—known in EU-circles as the “comitology process”—is difficult for outsiders to follow. It allows decisions to be taken in an opaque manner where it’s difficult to find out who is accountable and on what grounds decisions of approval or rejection are made.

Frustrated by the lack of transparency in the comitology process, I decided to conduct a spin-off investigation after our original piece was published. I cited the Aarhus convention— a set of rules to safeguard transparency in environmental matters—to chase up the Swedish Chemicals Agency and EFSA. After an appeal, EFSA decided to release information rejected in my first request. The Swedish authorities and courts have proved to be more stubborn. I filed a complaint against the Swedish government to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC), a UN-body in Geneva, where the case is pending.

Yet another follow-up led to the recently finalised investigation of Illegal Pesticides with financial support from the Journalism Fund and a Reporters in the field grant from the Robert Bosch Foundation in Germany.

Documentation including background and links to the published articles on Chlorpyrifos can be found here: https://www.ir-d.dk/chlorpyrifos/. The follow up investigation on the illegal pesticides trade can be found here: https://www.ir-d.dk/illegal-trade/

One evening in 2016, I met my friend Michael Bird—a British journalist who moved to Romania 20 years ago—for a beer. At the time, Michael was the editor of TheBlackSea.eu, a platform covering stories in Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey and Russia. I was working for a cultural platform called Scena9, but I was also a member of the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, and I had worked with Michael before.

Much like in our other meetings, we discussed projects we were involved in and potential story ideas on which we could collaborate. I told Michael that a few years ago I did a story about the situation of young detainees in Romania and I was still thinking about doing a follow-up story. At that time, Romania had one of the largest inmate populations in Europe (it has decreased in the last couple of years) and some of the most crowded prisons on the continent. The rate of recidivism in Romania was high, at 80%. The European Court on Human Rights condemned Romania for inadequate detention conditions and inhuman treatment of prisoners.

We debated the causes of this situation for a while. Was it because of social problems? Was it because the Romanian system is failing to rehabilitate former inmates? Was it because other EU countries are sending Romanians convicted abroad back to their home country? The official reports didn’t provide many answers. Michael and I decided to further investigate this situation and try to get access to inmates and officials, but we knew this would be a time-consuming and costly project.

We decided to apply for a grant from the Journalism Fund, but that meant that we needed to have a cross-border approach. We decided to investigate the situation of Romanian inmates in other EU countries, and to compare their situation to that of inmates from other nationalities. At the time, the EU and national authorities across member states didn’t provide any information on the nationality of foreign inmates, so we started asking for data. After receiving data from eight countries (Sweden, Denmark, UK, Italy, Holland, Germany, Estonia, Spain), we found out that Romania had the highest total number of detainees in each of those countries.

Because we knew that Romanians represented one of the largest migrant populations in Spain and Italy, we decided to contact journalists from both countries. I knew Feliciano Tisera, who was working for an online platform in Madrid, and Michael knew Cecilia Ferrara, a freelance journalist in Rome. We had in mind a sort of case study: finding and interviewing inmates or former inmates in Spain and Italy, then going to the places where they used to live in Romania, and studying the social and economic environment there.

But getting access to prisons was very difficult. Our requests for visits were denied, and responses were delayed, so we decided to focus on the situation outside prisons and on the potential sources of criminality. Together with Feliciano and Cecilia, we visited Roma settlements near Naples, Rome and Madrid, and interviewed victims of human trafficking, NGO representatives helping migrants, and authorities investigating criminal networks involved in child abuse and theft. We also visited Călărași, a town in southern Romania where about half of the Roma ethnic population has emigrated to Italy.

In parallel, we worked on a data story, putting together and analysing the information received from 25 of the EU countries, on the composition of foreign inmates in each state. We discovered that when we looked at the number of criminals as a percentage of their expat population, Romania did not come in the top spot—that dubious honour belonged to Lithuania. So we co-opted two Lithuanian journalists to help us understand the sources of criminality among this group. Also, we needed a data analyst and a graphic designer to create a website where we would put our stories and numbers. Finally, we contacted an illustrator to help us create covers for our articles.

During this project, we had to adapt quickly to new situations. When we were denied access to an institution, when a source was afraid to talk with us or when a hypothesis didn’t prove accurate, we found a new approach, we contacted new people and discovered new angles for our story. The crucial fact here was that we were in touch with the entire team, we permanently knew what they were able to obtain and what they could not. Permanently adapting our strategy, finding a Plan B, C, D and E helped us shape a series of stories which was better than what we expected when we started the project.

Despite the challenges and adjustments, despite working in a team of 9 people (6 journalists, 1 data analyst, 1 graphic designer and 1 illustrator) we finished the project in time and within the €8,500 budget provided by the Journalism Fund. The quality and transparency of the sources of our data (we created a separate article on the methodology we used) led to publications across Europe to quote our findings.

A presentation of the project and links to the stories published in different languages on different platforms are available here.