"I just wanted to save all of us from prison..."

Text by Denis Kurenov.
Originally published in Russian on Yuga.ru

How digitization and a fear of those in power turned Russians into perfect victims for con artists.

According to estimates by Sberbank, in 2025 Russians surrendered over R285 billion ($17.3 billion) to phone scammers – three times the annual budget of Krasnodar. And behind that dry statistic lie broken lives, million-ruble debts, and pure animal terror. Yuga.ru editor Denis Kurenov recounts the stories of several victims, concluding that neither  higher education nor critical thinking skills offers any real defense against modern technologies of deception.

The Price of A Phone Call

Three million rubles can fit into two fat paper envelopes, if you stack it in five-thousand-ruble notes. Nina Andreyevna knows this for a fact – she has held the envelopes. She had been saving up for over 15 years, ever since her grandson Artyom, then just a grade-schooler with skinned-up knees, said to her over tea: "Grandma, I don't think I'll ever get married." She laughed, and privately decided that, by the time of her grandson's wedding, he would have a financial "cushion." She wanted it to be a surprise.

The wedding is this summer, but the money is gone.

"I can't describe her face in that moment," said Olga, Nina Andreyevna's daughter, who then falls silent for a long time. "You know how it is when a person cries. And then there's when a person no longer cries, because there's nothing left to cry with. This was the latter."

Nina Andreyevna is the most ordinary of pensioners. A two-room apartment in a residential district, photographs of a husband who didn't live to see these times, refrigerator magnets from various cities sent by relatives. A life in which everything has been accounted years in advance.

Three million was every last kopek of her savings. But the scammers decided that wasn't enough. Over the few days their "session" lasted, Nina Andreyevna managed to take out a bank loan of just over a million rubles. She borrowed another million from Lyudmila Vasilyevna, a friend of several decades' standing – the woman who had promised to bake her signature cake for Nina’s grandson's wedding.

"Mom counted every kopek her entire life," Olga said. "She waited for sales, rewrote price tags in her head, argued over 20 rubles at the market. And this business of counting kopeks – it simply doesn't square with a person handing over everything she had in three days, and going into debt on top of it."

Olga spoke evenly, almost matter-of-factly – the way people speak after they've told the same story too many times, to the investigator, to the bank, to relatives, and have learned to hold their voice steady. She breaks only once, near the end of our conversation.

Trial by Crowd, and Victim-Blaming

After talking with the police and the bank staff, Olga gave in to the persistent requests of local journalists. Nina Andreyevna's story caught people's attention: it was, as they say in newsrooms, "human."

"I opened the comments once," Olga said. "I never opened them again, and I strictly forbade Mom from ever looking."

Under the article about her mother, strangers competed to be most witty. They wrote about "dementia" and "senility," about being "skimmed" and "natural selection." They wondered, sarcastically, where all that money had come from, and asked her to wire them some too.

"For them, it's a spectacle," Olga's said, her voice hardening. "They sit there reading about someone else's grief and they laugh. It's fun for them. For me, it's my mother, who now goes weeks without leaving her room and is afraid of her phone."

Psychology has a term for this: victim-blaming. The mechanism is simple, and precisely for that reason especially ugly: if you convince yourself the victim was "asking for it," a comforting illusion of safety appears – nothing like that could ever happen to me, I'm smart, I'm on my guard. Olga had to virtually drag her mother to a therapist. Nina Andreyevna resisted for over a month: "I'm not crazy… Don't shame me in front of people… I don't need your doctors, it'll pass on its own." Then, one evening, when Olga raised the subject of a doctor once again, Nina suddenly said that, if she were forced, she'd find a way to put an end to all of it. That it would be easier not to live at all than to go on living like this – deceived, robbed, made a laughingstock, guilty in the eyes of her daughter and her friend.

"After those words I stopped asking," Olga said. "I simply booked her an appointment with a specialist and drove her there myself. By force, like a child on her first day of school."

An IT Specialist's System Failure

Nina Andreyevna's fear of mockery was well founded: people who consider themselves smarter than everyone else show no mercy to victims. Igor, for instance, admits candidly that, until recently, he used to laugh at stories like these. He is 38 and works in IT – specifically in information security. It's his job to daily read about new scam schemes, to run briefings for his colleagues, to explain which links never to click – and for a long time he genuinely couldn't understand how a competent adult could "fall for that kindergarten stuff."

Then he fell for it.

It was an ordinary, stressful day: two back-to-back calls, an urgent software update, a small argument with his wife on the phone. In the middle of all that chaos, a call came in – a polite voice introduced himself as a flower-delivery courier and asked him to confirm an order through a link in an app.

"I don't even remember doing it," Igor said. "I forgot about it a minute later. The realization came afterward."

Within a day, he had lost nearly a million rubles. Igor said the modern scheme has nothing in common with the clumsy "Nigerian prince" letters of the 2000s. This is a polished script: a flawless imitation of an interface, a page indistinguishable from the real one, a voice with no accent and not a single stumble, perfect psychological timing.

A recent close call happened near to his family. His wife, Anya, was saved by pure chance. A close friend of hers, who was planning her own wedding, had her account hacked. The scammers then created a group chat in her name – a "wedding" chat – with invitations, a guest list, and a touching message about how happy the bride was to soon see everyone. To "confirm their attendance," guests were asked to go to an attractive-looking website and log in using any social network, supposedly to make compiling the guest list easier.

"Anya's VPN glitched right at that moment, the page wouldn't load. Pure technical bad luck – for the scammers, that is. Other people weren't so lucky: more than ten people's accounts were stolen through that one chat. Real, living people, each with their own small catastrophe now – but after what happened to me, I'm no longer willing to laugh at them."

"Don't Consult Anyone"

If Igor and his wife were attacked through technology, in Nina Andreyevna's case the bet was placed on pure psychology and fear. The scammers ran a multi-stage scenario against which an elderly woman stood almost no chance. First came a call from the bank's "security service." Then "law enforcement" joined in. Polite, correct, addressing her by her name and patronymic, respectful, without pressure. They told her something terrifying: her account had been hacked, and money was already flowing out – to fund the Ukrainian military, no less. Which meant that, formally, she could be charged with treason. And the consequences wouldn't impact only her. Her daughter would be affected, as would her grandson – the person whose wedding she'd been saving up for.

What followed was a days-long conveyor belt of threats, instructions, and calls on a strict schedule. She was forbidden from telling her family anything – "the operation is under way, any leak will ruin everything and you'll be charged." And she, a law-abiding woman who had spent her whole life more afraid than anything of "causing trouble," did exactly as she was told. She withdrew money, transferred it, borrowed more, took out a loan, and reported back to the scammers on every step.

Olga saved Nina almost by accident – she came by unannounced and found her in a strange, sluggish state.

At first, Nina told her nothing at all. She withdrew into herself, looked away, mumbled that everything was fine, that Olga was imagining things, that she just had high blood pressure and had lain down – and started all but shooing her daughter out: go on home, it's late, I'm tired.

"I simply didn't leave," Olga said. "I sat down in the kitchen and said: I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what's going on. I'm her daughter, after all. I know when something's wrong with her."

And, at some point, Nina Andreyevna decided to open up. She told her everything – haltingly, almost in a whisper. About the "security service," about the "investigator," about the hacked account and the money supposedly flowing to the enemy. About treason, about the threats, about how she wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or consult anyone.

"And at that point I stopped reasoning it through. I blocked every number there was. I didn't let her call back, even though she was desperate to. I stood over her like a guard and kept her phone with me until she calmed down."

And when the apartment finally went quiet, her mother started to cry. For the first time in all those days. Before, she hadn't had time for tears, she'd been "working," saving the family. Now she sat on a stool, diminished, and sobbed like a child, and through the tears she said: "I just wanted to save all of us from prison."

This is where Olga breaks. A long pause.

"You understand, she wasn't trying to save herself. She wasn't sorry for herself at all. She was saving us – me, her grandson. She was absolutely certain that she was protecting the family, performing some kind of heroic feat, staying silent and enduring it all for our sake. And afterward we were the fools who dared to be hurt by her – why didn't she call, why didn't she ask us first. Because she'd been told that if she called, we'd all be arrested. And she believed it. Who would you have believed, in her place – your own daughter, or a man who introduced himself as an investigator and threatened to arrest the people closest to you?"

The Anatomy of Fear

"This can happen to anyone," said Yekaterina, a clinical psychologist who has worked with three patients who were victims of scammers. "A scammer doesn't hack our intelligence – he appeals to our fears. And for Russians, unfortunately, those fears are all too understandable, and very much alike."

According to her, the scheme that caught Nina Andreyevna strikes at the deepest level – a place where logic no longer functions.

"The older generation grew up in the Soviet Union. There, a reflex was drilled in at the level of the spinal cord: don't say anything against the authorities, don't argue with the organs, do as you're told, and maybe things will work out. That reflex hasn't gone anywhere. It lives in the body, and no amount of public-safety pamphlets can root it out. And today's situation, as the person experiences it internally, is exactly the same. Someone called from 'where it matters.' They said the terrifying words: 'treason,' 'investigation,' 'we'll arrest the whole family.' And at that moment, the switch flips on: a panicked fear of a state that can do anything and cannot be argued with. Overcome by that kind of horror, a person is ready to comply with any demand, however absurd, just so the trouble passes them by, just so their loved ones aren't touched."

The hardest part, Yekaterina admitted, is treating cases like these after the dust settles.

"In classic trauma work, we help a person see that the threat wasn't real, that the danger has passed, that there's nothing left to be afraid of. 'You were simply deceived. There was no investigator, no one is coming for you.' But that approach doesn't work here, and that's the whole difficulty. Because the fear the scammer was leaning on isn't built on fantasy – it's built on reality. The person reads the news, sees real examples. It turns out I can't talk my patient out of the very thing that frightened her, because it's true. All I can work with is the shame, the guilt, the financial catastrophe, the shattered trust in everyone and everything. But with the root of the fear itself – I can do almost nothing. It stays."

Digitalization as the Scammers' Stronghold

Igor keeps returning to a thought that won't leave him alone, precisely because he's a professional.

"Here's the most infuriating part," he said. "Our biggest point of pride, the thing we can genuinely be proud of – digitization, our great IT projects, this whole life-in-one-click existence – is exactly what's destroying us right now. And what's most striking is that the authorities, with all their resources and power, seem unable to do anything about it. Our own achievements, the ones we ought to be showing off to the whole world, have been turned against us."

His irritation is professional, almost physical – the way an engineer gets irritated seeing a design flaw he has no authority to fix. And behind the irritation is a firm conviction about who is behind it all.

"Why even ask, it's obvious who's behind it," he said with certainty. "[Ukrainians.] There's a double payoff here. On the one hand, there is simple profit – cleaning out the enemy's population. On the other – and to my mind this matters even more – breaking us morally. Demoralizing us. Making a person afraid of his own phone, unable to trust his bank, or law enforcement, or his neighbor."

That a significant share of these call centers really do operate from Ukrainian territory isn't something Igor made up – it's something that both major banks and “foreign agent” media outlets agree upon.

"And here's what I honestly don't understand," he said. "If it's so profitable and so effective, why don't identical centers operate in the other direction, against the [Ukrainians] themselves? They can be frightened too, plenty. They've got their own panic button over there, no worse than ours. You call someone up: 'This is the TCR calling [Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support – the Ukrainian military administrative body responsible for military registration and mobilization.]. You've been summoned. Report, or pay to buy your way out right now.' And he'll do anything, just to make it go away."

He's talking about another country, but the recipe is universal: modern technology plus fear of one's own state.

Neural Networks in the Service of Criminals

Modern social-engineering methods blur the line between reality and fabrication so thoroughly that confidence in one's own safety has become a dangerous delusion. Real-life cases make that clear – and show that anyone can become a victim.

Galina Stepanovna worked for many years at a local cultural institution. One day she received a video message purportedly from the city's mayor – with his face, his voice, his recognizable manner of speaking, addressing her by name and patronymic. The "mayor" explained that the situation was delicate and urgent, that she needed to get in touch immediately with "representatives of the security services," and transfer funds to a "safe account" – otherwise the whole institution would face problems. Galina Stepanovna was saved by the fact that her grandson Kirill, a university student, happened to be nearby at that moment. It took him a good fifteen minutes of effort to make his grandmother understand something that was obvious to him: the text, the voice, and the image was AI-generated.

The second story comes from the younger generation. A classmate asked Anton for a loan: he first wrote in a messaging app – help me out, I'll pay you back in a week, I desperately need a hundred thousand rubles. Anton hesitated; something didn't sit right. And then, sensing the hesitation, his "friend" sent a voice message "just to be sure." The very same voice, the very same turns of phrase, the very same lazy intonation his friend always used to tease him with. His doubts vanished. Anton transferred the money. The voice message, it turned out much later, had been generated from real voice messages pulled from a hacked account. His actual friend, of course, had never been part of that conversation at all – and he only learned any of it happened when Anton called to remind him about the debt.

Epilogue: Art Therapy and Life After the Catastrophe

"You know what's actually needed?" psychologist Yekaterina said, choosing her words carefully. "Not another fine-print notice on the back of some contract, and not a web banner no one reads. This needs to be talked about on central television. Every day, in prime time, calmly, in detail, without moralizing and without that eternal condescending tone. Because the scammers' main target is still, above all, the television viewer – mostly pensioners. Someone who still trusts what comes out of the television and doesn't trust a link on the internet. That's where this inoculation needs to be delivered – into the television – in plain words, with real, concrete stories, breaking down every scheme. Every single day, until the knowledge is worn as deep into habit as the fear once was. Show it once, and it's forgotten. But once it becomes background noise, like the weather forecast – that's when there's a real chance."

There is no happy ending to this story. No therapy in the world will bring back three million in savings, a million in loans, and a million in debt – that money is simply gone, dissolved into other people's pockets thousands of kilometers away. But there is a sequel, and, strangely enough, it's a bright one.

Nina Andreyevna still sees her therapist – now of her own accord, without cajoling or scenes, by appointment. And recently, out of nowhere, she has taken up drawing. She’d never done anything like that before, not as a child, not as a young woman.

"At first it was just dark blotches, smears, nothing but black and gray streaks," Olga said, and for the first time in our whole conversation her voice warmed. "The psychologist said this is how she's working through what she can't put into words. But the most recent pieces are bright. She drew our courtyard. The swing I used to ride as a child. Yesterday she sent me a photo of a new drawing: a long table set out in the courtyard under the old poplar tree, and around it – crowds and crowds of people. I asked her, Mom, what is this? And she answered: 'This is us celebrating the second day of Artyom's wedding. It's going to be the most beautiful one there ever was, no matter what.'"