Phone scammers still haunting Belarusian capital

A new scheme of the old "scam" has been invented by phone scammers. Swindlers hack into Viber accounts to call their victims from the Belarusian numbers. Earlier, according to the police, the calls to the phones of Belarusians were coming from foreign numbers. Now the scammers have begun to operate in a different way. The police became aware of this after a complaint from a resident of Molodechno. The attackers used the account of her 12-year-old daughter and lured through a messenger the details of other people's bank cards. The scammers don't forget the good old classic and keep on attacking pensioners with made-up stories about road accidents, in which their close relatives were allegedly involved.

The city is literally buzzing with calls from con artists. Residents of the Frunzensky District, the most densely populated district of the capital, are under telephone attack most of all. And with each new scam they manage to swindle more and more money.

The attackers have "earned" more than Br6.5 million in Minsk alone since last spring.

The schemes of telephone con artists are almost all identical. Only the age of the victims and the amount they give to the crooks vary. The minimum is 1000 rubles, the maximum is 50 thousand dollars. Money which has been collected for years leaves with the couriers at once.

Today 420 such criminal cases have been filed in Minsk. These are complete cases, where people have transferred money to swindlers. The police have already prosecuted about 500 criminal cases of attempted fraud, where people have recognized it, objectively evaluated it and refused to fool themselves.

Phone calls, according to the data available to law enforcement agencies, are made from abroad, to be exact, from Russia. And identifying the organizers of criminal schemes is problematic. All the money of the victims is flowing to fraudsters via transfers to cryptocurrency wallets or through bank accounts.

There have been such cases when customers demanded to transfer money, the money was not transferred, they send information about the courier with all the personal data to the police department. Because before they work, there is actually recruitment, all the passport data is taken. They keep these couriers on blackmail.

In total, the detectives were able to identify and detain more than 90 couriers, almost half of them in custody. The average age of the mercenary swindlers ranges from 18 to 30 years old. Most of them were men, usually unemployed, some with a criminal record. Offers of illegal earnings were found by them on the Internet.

Sergei Novik, deputy chief of criminal police of Minsk City Executive Committee:

“The couriers brought in to participate in the fraud are certainly aware of their role in this criminal scheme. This is evidenced by several factors, including receiving direct instructions on the methods of conspiracy from the organizers. Also, the couriers often send the organizers videos in which they agree to participate in the criminal scheme.”

Now the telephone attacks of scammers, according to the police, are on the decline. If in spring the law enforcers recorded up to 100 such calls a day, now their number in the city decreases to 10. However, investigators believe that with the end of the holiday season, the number of victims of fraudulent tricks may again increase. And so they ask the children of the pensioners to remind their parents how to act in such situations.