The key facts

  • A Moscow resident was defrauded of 225 million rubles through a chain of calls from fake 'security service officers'
  • The victim handed a courier gold coins worth 12 million rubles, sold his shares and withdrew money from his accounts for months
  • The case follows the record 450 million rubles swindled from a Moscow woman

Theft of 225 million rubles

Phone scammers stole 225 million rubles from a Moscow resident, the capital's prosecutor's office reported on its Telegram channel. According to the agency, the scheme began with a message supposedly from a government agency asking to verify personal data: after following a link and entering the received code, the man received a notification that his personal account had been 'hacked'. Then a young woman called, presenting herself as an employee of an 'anti-fraud department', and transferred the call to a man who claimed to be a law enforcement officer.

How the fraudsters operated

Details of the scheme are reported by Gazeta.Ru. The criminal told the Muscovite that a power of attorney had supposedly been issued in his name and persuaded him to install a mobile app on his phone. After that, the victim was persuaded to take part in a 'secret operation' to save his savings, which supposedly needed to be declared. Following the instructions, the man took gold coins worth 12 million rubles out of a bank safe deposit box, packed them into bags and handed them to a courier. Later he sold his shares, and over several months withdrew money from his accounts and handed it over to unknown people. When the man realized he had been deceived, he turned to law enforcement; identifying those involved is being overseen by the Moscow prosecutor's office.

Context: a record 450 million rubles

This case is a new one in a series of large thefts from Muscovites. Earlier, scammers swindled a record 450 million rubles out of a Moscow woman — how exactly this happened became known from a separate report. Anton Kononenko, head of the cybercrime unit at the capital's Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, said that active efforts against cyber fraudsters have been underway since 2019, and during this time there have been incidents in which victims lost several hundred million rubles each, but the record was precisely 450 million rubles. Thus, the new theft of 225 million rubles falls short of the record, but confirms that victims' losses are still measured in hundreds of millions of rubles.