Thread by @akoz33

Here is a translation of a fragment of Latynina’s “Kod Dostupa” from two days ago. I can think of nothing that shows better the attitude of Russian authorities to the population than this story.

“I want to tell a wonderful story that really struck me hard recently. You've probably noticed that we have a lot of telephone scammers who are trying to get people to transfer money to them by means of their ATM cards. The problem has taken on the character of a major

disaster. It has been growing exponentially since 2018. These "ringers" - as they are called in the jargon - have supplanted virtually all other banking fraud schemes.

Here is a typical example. A person calls and says: “I am your bank's security service. There are swindlers in our bank. Your money is in danger. Therefore, we urgently go to the ATM. We have created a special account for you, transfer money to it. "

Sometimes people believe this so much that they run to the ATM and when they transfer money, the bank security service calls them and says: “You are making a suspicious transaction here”, they say: “Yes, yes, I have known you scammers would call me, to stop this transaction. "

To give you an idea of the size of the problem, I will only consider Sberbank, the largest Russian bank, in which a lot of pensioners and other rather vulnerable people keep their money. That is, just the number of transactions prevented by the bank and money that was not

transferred to fraudsters, in the first 8 months of 2019 was 25.3 billion rubles, and the first 8 months of the 2020 is already 42.4 billion rubles. I emphasize that this is the money that has not been transferred.

Moreover, this is the clients' money, this is not something that the bank will reimburse. That is, the bank has an anti-fraud system that can block this transfer by itself. But what should the bank do when a client says: Yes, transfer this money, please. I am doing it myself.

Earlier I heard about it but did not realise the extent of this disaster. I was always surprised that these scammers are never caught and imprisoned. Because everyone knows that in Russia if you throw a plastic cup at a policeman, then that is it for you.

Or if on Twitter you write something about the “skreponostsy” (hard to translate term referring to Russian “ultra-patriots” and “carriers of orthodox values”, originating from Putin’s speech )
But if you collectively take millions and billions out of the

pockets of citizens, then, apparently, no one is interested. And then we discover something even more amazing.

Sberban, has been concerned with this problem. And when it began to investigate where the calls were coming from, it turned out that some of the calls came from the territory of Ukraine, which is understandable, but according to various estimates,

either a third or half of the people who commit this fraud call from prison call centers. That is, these people do not need to be imprisoned, because they are already imprisoned. From one third to one half of these fraudulent calls come from colonies

and pre-trial detention centers.
How did they discover it? It’s very simple, because sometimes, when it’s not possible to deceive, these people themselves switch to prison jargon, and sometimes they honestly say that, you know, I’m sitting here and calling you to give me your

money. I have a sofa, I have food, and if I do not fulfill the norm for scamming citizens, then I will be sent to do hard labor.

Olga Romanova, in her column, gives a wonderful example of an SMS message that came to Sitting Russia.

When a fraudster called, he made it clear that he was a fraudster, and quietly said: “Listen, this is IK-74. If I do not call, they will not give me food or water, and they will beat me. "

That is, I draw your attention to the fact that this is a big business, because fraudsters imitate a real call center of the bank, and they use different conversation scenarios, music etc. That is, they again call from a number that has been converted,

it seems to be in Moscow, because it was most likely bought by the corresponding company.

And so, as the cops did nothing, Sberbank got upset, and they and mobile operators, that is, for their own money, drew up a scheme that showed: here are the subscribers who were deceived

by the fraudsters, here are the locations from which these scammers called, and here are the coordinates of the prisons in the country. Then they connect the coordinates of the call source to these their subscribers. And, it turned out that these calls came from such

and such pre-trial detention centers and such and such prisons.

And, for example, on August 2020 there were 690 calls from such and such institution of the Federal Penitentiary Service, but from such and such - 600. And from Moscow Detention Center No. 1 - only 225.

Why is this last figure wonderful? Because Detention Center # 1, also known as Matrosskaya Tishina, is a Detention Center that was found to be a prison call center in July. They seized SIM cards and telephones and announced that there were two culprits:

an ordinary inspector and an operational employee. And it's just like with Argentine cocaine, when it turned out that there was a giant scheme, when cocaine was transported by diplomatic mail, and some Argentine policeman and some man named Kovalchuk were to blame.

That is, America had a call center in this "Matrosskaya Tishina", where there were up to 50 employees. They made almost 20 thousand calls a week. So what? And we see that, according to Sberbank, the call center was in the same Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center,

where recently there was this loud arrest at the request of Sberbank and after the alleged arrest of the ringleaders, it continued to operate as before.

I want to draw your attention to a few points. Firstly, covid has not affected this wave-like increase in fraudulent calls in any way. Because the Federal Penitentiary Service always explained:

“This happens because lawyers come to visit, relatives come to visit. We can’t help it." But now we have covid, complete isolation, access cannot be obtained, and the number of calls is growing.

As far as I know, Sberbank now believes that there is a call center in every third center of the Russian penal system. Olga Romanova claims that they exist in half of them.

In general, if you remember, there was a novel by Yuli Dubov called "Varangians and Thieves" about

how a penal colony was transformed into a commercial enterprise. And in this case, I have several questions. So we have here a businesses in which thieves and criminals are the directirs. And the passive shareholders who simply cut coupons are apparently the staff of the

colonies. And it is difficult to imagine that this can be done without the knowledge of the authorities.

And note that the business is very efficient. Because one of the main problems of any business is the cost of personnel salaries.

In this case, the personnel is entirely paid by the state.
And if a person does not contribute to the enterprise, that is, does not steal money from pensioners, then he is beaten and deprived of rations. This is really impressive. Even the slave owners did not

as well, because they, poor fellows, had to fork out for the slaves. And here it is all free. All costs of maintaining the labor force are borne by the state.