A courier working for telephone scammers has been detained in St. Petersburg after collecting nearly 2.6 million rubles from a 74-year-old pensioner, local police announced in a Telegram post.
According to police, the victim reported the crime to the Vyborgsky district force on July 19. Between July 9 and July 16, unknown callers posing as employees of various security agencies persuaded him to hand his personal savings to a courier outside his home on four separate occasions. Total losses amounted to 2,596,000 rubles.
Eleven days after the report, on July 30, a 28-year-old unemployed man from the Orenburg region was detained near a residential building in the city. He was remanded in custody and a criminal case was opened against him under the provision covering fraud on an especially large scale.
In a separate incident, scammers stole 30 million rubles from a retired couple in Moscow using the same approach, convincing them to transfer money under the pretext of a financial verification.
