The key facts

  • The fraudsters operated via Telegram, using the name and photo of the victim's colleague.
  • The woman was promised reissued accounts to replace the compromised ones, with funds credited to the new accounts.
  • Police described the typical victim profile: a single woman over 45 living in a city.

How the scheme unfolded

The Moscow Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has revealed details of the theft of a record 450 million rubles from a Moscow resident; the figures were provided by the directorate's press service, as cited by Life.ru. It all began with a message on Telegram from a user whose profile name and photo matched a colleague of the victim — this was how the fraudsters built trust. The interlocutor asked whether a curator from the FSB had contacted the woman and warned that he would write to her soon.

Fake FSB and Central Bank officers

Then other participants joined the scheme, posing as officers of the Russian FSB and the Bank of Russia. They claimed there had been a leak of personal data from the organization where the Muscovite works and threatened her with criminal liability for disclosing the content of the conversations. After that, the woman was convinced that her bank accounts had been compromised and needed to be reissued: to keep her savings safe, she was told to withdraw the money in cash and hand it to a courier, with the funds promised to be credited to new accounts. The victim followed the instructions and lost 450 million rubles.

The record and the victim's profile

The unprecedented amount of damage had already been reported on October 19 by Anton Kononenko, head of the cybercrime unit of the Moscow Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs , but at the time the details of the scheme were not disclosed — now the police have described the sequence of the criminals' actions. Also new in the publication was the agency's observation about the typical victim of such crimes: according to the police, it is most often a single woman over 45 living in a city, while having a permanent job is not a determining factor.The unprecedented amount of damage had already been reported on October 19 by Anton Kononenko, head of the cybercrime unit of the Moscow Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs