The Scorpions were founded in 1991 by Jovica Stanišić, the head of Serbia's State Security Services, who also had a secret relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.

[5] Initially composed of Serbs from eastern Slavonia, the unit began its operations during the Battle of Vukovar in late 1991.

[3] They participated in the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995,[1] and filmed the execution of six Bosnian Muslims near the village of Trnovo, named The Scorpions, A Home Movie.

[5] In 2004, Saša Cvjetan was charged for his role in the Podujevo massacre and was sentenced by a Serbian court to a twenty-year jail term.

[14] A fictionalized version of the Scorpions is depicted in the 2013 film Killing Season, starring Robert de Niro and John Travolta.

[15] In the 2016 film Captain America: Civil War, the primary villain, Baron Helmut Zemo, was a Colonel in a covert paramilitary deathsquad known as "EKO Scorpion" in the fictional Eastern European country of Sokovia.