Ukrainian scammers thought to be tricking Russian pensioners into blowing up ATMs
By Daniel Hardaker
London: A Russian pensioner takes a box of matches into a bank and douses a row of cash machines with flammable liquid.
The 68-year-old lights a match and hesitantly creeps forward with a smartphone in one hand to film what she is about to do.
The ATMs after the December explosion.Credit: YouTube
She dashes it onto the nearest machine, which immediately triggers a huge explosion.
The incident was caught on CCTV in St Petersburg in December, and there are no indications the motivations of the unlikely saboteur – who survived the explosion – were political. Instead, it appears she – like many others – was duped into it by Ukrainian phone scammers.
One out of 92 arson attacks recorded in Russia in 2024 was politically motivated, the independent Russian news site Meduza reported, with the vast majority resulting from complex scams concocted in murky call centres operating out of enemy territory.
Russian and Ukrainian sources said the scammers were masters of psychology who use a variety of intricate ruses, some of which seem difficult to fall for – at first glance.
Artyom, a Russian cybersecurity researcher in his 20s living in Moscow who asked not to use his real name, said that older people, scared of authorities after living through the USSR, are particularly vulnerable to one scheme that involved scammers pretending to be agents from the federal security service (FSB).
The “agents” will, for instance, tell their victims that they are under investigation for a crime and demand they torch a location to avoid punishment.
“The whole point is to pressure you,” said Artyom. “Get you in a state of fear, urgency … they explicitly tell you [that] you cannot talk to anyone, that it’s very dangerous. They literally zombify you.
“This is precisely why all these crazy scripts work … if they were not put in this state of mind, they would never fall for it.”
Another common scam involves callers pretending to be from a financial institution, who then dupe the victim into either transferring money to them or giving them access codes to their bank accounts.
Once the fraudsters have the money, they tell the victim it will be returned only if they attack a specified target.
The number of calls is said to have increased dramatically in recent months.
Artyom said that most of the calls were flagged by smartphones as being “scam-likely”, but he can still receive three or four a week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last month dismissed a suggestion made at a phone-in press conference that he should target what are believed to be Ukrainian scammers behind the attacks.Credit: AP
When he picks up the phone, his response is brief: “I just ask, ‘Who does Crimea belong to?’ and they hang up.”
Older people, however, often have older phones that are not capable of screening the calls, meaning they potentially receive many more than three or four a week.
Ukrainians are able to obtain Russian phone numbers relatively easily because widespread corruption has long led to Russian citizens’ personal data being sold on black market web forums, often after being leaked by state agencies.
Russian authorities have wasted no time in responding to pensioners being weaponised against them. The Kremlin banned internet calls to mobiles and landlines on December 28, claiming it would combat the scammers.
The interior ministry also called on citizens “to be more vigilant and not to contact unknown interlocutors by phone or other means of communication”.
A St Petersburg official was reported to have said on December 23 that video cameras were being installed at military enlistment offices and that he was working mainly with elderly people to prevent further attacks.
Younger people have also been convinced by the callers to commit acts of vandalism, usually through offers of cash that are rarely paid out.
A man who set fire to two electric trains in the Moscow region on December 30 told Russian law enforcement officers that he had been offered 100,000 roubles ($1600) for the attack, but that he never received it, according to the Izvestia newspaper.
Ukraine has long been a world-leading hotspot for fraudulent call centres, with criminal gangs targeting Western countries as well as Russia.
But there are some indications that Ukrainian authorities may have been involved in December’s wave of attacks.
Last month’s blitz was the largest of the war so far and coincided with Russia’s Security Agency Worker Day on December 20, when the country is supposed to honour security officers responsible for preventing such attacks.
A Ukrainian law enforcement source told The Economist that the scammers were mainly financially motivated but “they may occasionally serve the fatherland too”.
An intelligence source said: “Ukraine’s special services are at work. It’s a routine operation.
“You can get a grandmother to throw a Molotov cocktail into a military office or wherever you want – if your price is right.”
Although Russia’s pensioner arsonists are often duped or blackmailed into committing their crimes and are usually given more lenient sentences than committed terrorists, they stand little chance of getting off lightly.
Russian legislation does not exempt from liability those who committed a crime under significant third-party psychological pressure, said Igor Ivlev, a criminal defence lawyer, according to Izvestia.
Zara Gorbushina, a lawyer, said: “In the best-case scenario, the perpetrator faces charges of hooliganism using objects as weapons – a sentence of up to seven years.”
On December 19, Vladimir Putin held his four-hour-long annual phone-in press conference.
He was asked by one caller to make targeting the scammers a priority of the Ukraine war. The Russian president promptly dismissed the suggestion.
The Telegraph, London
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