The Tale of the Vrublevsky Case - This is Netflix, right?
And so, dear readers. We continue where we left off. And in order to enjoy this tragicomedy to the fullest, we ask you to first read the first chapter of this amazing, delightful story. However, this text turned out to be so long that we divided it into parts and decided to call it a novel.
We note that this longread, no matter how huge it is, concerns literally everyone in Russia. More specifically, this text will be immensely useful to all banking, legal, financial, and rental workers in Russia, all entrepreneurs without exception, especially on the Internet, all Russians and, of course, all security officials. So today, using an example and with documents in hand, we will refute all your speculations about what and how, and who can be prosecuted in Russia today. It is believed that in general anyone can be prosecuted, but each of us still assumes that this will not happen to him for one reason or another, and probably there is always some explanation. Not so.
As it turned out, any banker, owner of office space, lawyer, anyone who provides services to a business can be prosecuted, accusing them of collusion with the business, and the business itself does not necessarily have to be illegal. On the contrary, the more legal, the worse. In addition, any Russian can at any moment become a victim, without his own desire and damage, and be brought from one end of the country to the other (at his own expense) and suffer for years in court. And then, very likely, find himself the defendant for a false denunciation. In addition, any Russian civil servant can assess how meaningless his work really is, since no law has the slightest meaning, especially provisions on personal data, the law on the national payment system or the law on consumer rights. In addition, from this story any employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, the Prosecutor's Office and the Court will learn what the nitpicking of the management and inspectors is worth, since in fact no one is interested in or needs any of the laws of criminal law. Well, about such trifles that you can just end up in jail, just by getting a job, or taking a design order on Workzilla, you probably already know.
After our last material, the trial of Vrublevsky slowed down a bit. This is not surprising, the missing disk, which is essentially the only evidence that the money was written off from half of the victims, generally speaking, in a normal situation should have interrupted the trial and, most likely, simply ended it.
However, this did not happen, since the prosecution would prefer anything other than recording the obvious for the fourth year already. That no case actually existed from the very beginning.
In order for this to be as clear as possible to the reader, we will have to take a step back.
To appreciate the full depth of insanity, it is possible only by assessing the entire accusation in detail. Let us reassure the reader, it will even be funny in its own way. Such a tragicomedy. Oh, it will be very funny!
And so. Vrublevsky is charged with the following story. Pavel Olegovich once had a well-known payment company on the market - ChronoPay. That is, a business where other companies and various Internet services could apply for the service of accepting payments by bank cards. Over the years, MTS and Tele-2 and dozens of airlines, including the second largest in Russia Transaero, hundreds of charitable societies, almost the entire Russian legal gambling market from Alpari, Fonbet and 1XBet to Stoloto and even Wildberries accepted payments through ChronoPay. In the payment market in Russia, it is believed that many now famous top managers of the banking world went through the ChronoPay "school", while Qiwi was probably an alternative "school" for a long time.
In 2020, a certain company, Vangood LLC, accepted payments through ChronoPay. It owned the king-donate.com website, which was a service for streamers in RuNet. The king-donate website had a module for paying donations via Twitch and other similar services. It was because of this company that a criminal case was opened.
We emphasize that now in this article we will be extremely objective towards the investigation, so that no one will accuse us of a one-sided approach. That is, we do not show anything one-sidedly in this article, and we write exclusively based on the case materials, and we publish them immediately. If you find at least some other explanation for this story than we found, you are welcome.
Judge for yourself. According to the investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the said company VanGud was in fact organized by the CEO of ChronoPay, businessman Pavel Olegovich Vrublevsky, for which he created an organized criminal group from his employees and other persons, and the company itself (apparently) never provided any services to any streamers, but in fact was a fraudulent scheme in the RuNet for deceiving Russian citizens in various kinds of fake lotteries and similar fraudulent tricks. This is what the investigation claimed.
After the arrests under the state The suspects were Vrublevsky, his company's technical director Somov, financial director Belyaev, and a certain student Matvey Vedyashkin, who was under a written undertaking not to leave the country, and of course, the conditional "general director" of VanGud LLC, Nadezhda Akimova, was arrested. We write "conditional" because the formal general director of VanGud was her brother, and she acted under a power of attorney.
High-ranking officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs quite officially publicly reported on the disclosure of the entire scheme described above, and according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the total number of victims in Russia amounted to about one hundred thousand citizens, for a possible sum of several billion rubles. That's it. No less.
All the mentioned persons were initially charged under Article 159 (fraud) for a completely ridiculous sum of 220 thousand rubles from 19 victims. However, this absurd sum was probably explained by the very beginning of the investigation. The first lawyer present at Vrublevsky's arrest, having studied the search warrant and having seen the amount of damages of two hundred thousand rubles, having looked at over forty employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who had arrived for the search, looked at the investigator in amazement and said briefly, "Excuse me, is this some kind of joke?"
Along the way, the activity of ChronoPay itself, a company with a 20-year history, was blocked, either by accident or perhaps not so much, since the Ministry of Internal Affairs investigation seized the company's servers, but it turned out that for some reason the servers contained the only copy of the databases of the entire service. Looking ahead, the servers are still there.
What is important here is this. What do you think the Ministry of Internal Affairs had "on hand" at that moment to bring such charges? As it turned out, not very much - a report from the Department "F" of the Main Directorate for Economic Security and Combating Corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, we give a link to it in full, where on 12-plus pages a scheme for deceiving citizens is described quite effectively and meticulously, and it was on the basis of this report that the allegations of hundreds of thousands of victims and billions in damages and, in fact, 19 statements of the above-mentioned victims arose. Let us repeat, for a ridiculous amount of two hundred thousand rubles (that's two thousand US dollars, by the way). Whatever else was there, it was not included in the case materials in court and we will not find out about it yet.
Actually, due to the very low damage, the fourth article of Article 159 of the Criminal Code, without which the arrest would not have been possible, was presented to the accused in a relatively rare formulation. Usually, this article in the last fourth part is charged due to the amount of damage, but in this case, since the amount was too small, the article was charged because, according to the investigation, all the accused were an "organized criminal group", and recently such wording also allows for the fourth part of Article 159 to be charged.
Part two. Testimony of the accused.
What did the accused themselves say?
Dmitry Somov got scared and agreed to sign anything, was released to house arrest and signed a pre-trial agreement, that is, in essence, he simply signed the above-mentioned report from the Main Directorate of Economic Security and Anti-Corruption, as it turned out later, without reading it. The other four refused to admit guilt. Belyaev explained that if he was the financial director of ChronoPay, then nominally, since he worked there for a very short time and, along with three other employees, he is a completely random person who got a job through HeadHunter website for six months and soon quit. Moreover, what kind of criminal group can we talk about if they didn't pay his salary, why did he himself sue ChronoPay for a year? He doesn't really know and didn't know Vrublevsky himself. The fact is that Pavel Olegovich mostly worked from home, especially since it was the period of covid, and he saw an ordinary employee of the finance department, "hired by advertisement" several times in his life. Student Matvey turned out to be an even more random person - a freelancer hired by an unclear person on the Workzilla website for one single purpose - to develop the king-donate website. Matvey received payment from Vangood LLC officially for the design of this website and has no idea about any aspect of the case, and on the website itself, which he developed, he did not see a trace of any "schemes" - it was an ordinary standard order, of which he has hundreds, if not thousands. With Akimova, the matter was more complicated. Akimova explained that she was the de facto CEO and owner of VanGud LLC, having essentially registered the business in the name of her brother. She has no idea about any fraudulent schemes, she really knows all of these people except Matvey, having mixed up half of their nicknames during interrogations, she believes that her company VanGud was used without her knowledge, since she herself does not quite understand what exactly the company was doing. In her opinion, the company was a project for charity for children, to which she was going to dedicate her life.
Vrublevsky eventually brought understanding to this confusion. He explained that the said company is a client of ChronoPay, with the only difference being that its employees helped the Internet entrepreneurs whose business it was to register VanGud LLC for work, helped find the director, as a result of which the authorities could really, if they really wanted to, have a suspicion that this is a joint business of ChronoPay employees with these entrepreneurs, but in reality it was never like that. It was just a client. This kind of help is no different from hundreds of similar tasks for different clients of the company over twenty years. Even the director was provided by the lawyer Pavel Zaitsev, known throughout the country. There was never any talk of any nominal legal entities. He also added that neither he, nor in his opinion any of the arrested persons, can in any way be accused of fraud, since they have no idea what exactly was sold on this site. Once again, for complete understanding - none of the arrested persons ever saw what exactly was sold on the site. Including the police.
Reading further, you will learn a fantastic (literally) detail. The fact is that none of the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs saw what exactly was sold through this site.
Vrublevsky added that he had already encountered pressure directly on this company in the past, a good year before the investigation, conducted his own investigation, found out that the pressure was organized by Sberbank employee Zoya Borovkova, who turned out to be no more and no less than the mistress (!) of American spy Sergei Mikhailov, convicted on the testimony of Pavel Olegovich himself. Either she was trying to help him, or the devil knows what she was doing, since in the process of this pressure she was “handing out right and left” unmasked (that is, full) bank card numbers of clients of this very VanGud, which is both illegal and abnormal for an employee of any bank. And in fact, the whole situation with the arrest is more reminiscent of some kind of “idiocy”, and not at all a CIA spy provocation or someone’s “deal”. But what is most important and beautiful, in fact, why exactly he made such a sharp conclusion, according to Vrublevsky - no matter what and who was guided by, and no matter how you consider the relations of everyone among themselves, in an organized crime group or not, and with spies and without, all this is devoid of the slightest sense for the following reason - the police officers before the arrests did not know for sure that the company ChronoPay and all its clients, like VanGood, in accordance with the rules of Visa / Mastercard / MIR and the relevant Russian legislation, the listing of which would take a good page, carried out refunds on any disputed transactions immediately upon contacting dissatisfied customers. And it does not matter where the customers contacted, ChronoPay, or VanGood, or to the Patriarch with a prayer. Since the levels of these refunds are constantly measured, there is not the slightest possibility that the company VanGood can have any victims in the industrial quantities declared by the investigation. This is simply impossible. Russian legislation does not allow a person to be recognized as a victim if that person received the funds back before applying to the authorities. Of the hundreds of thousands of VanGood customers, over a million transactions have been processed through the service in four months of operation. Of course, someone could have somehow forgotten to complain somewhere, including to the Patriarch, but still end up with a statement to the police, but we are talking about isolated cases, and not about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, thousands or even hundreds of victims. This is simply impossible, since literally every request is carefully processed. Including prayers. And therefore there is no point in finding out everything else. There are no victims and cannot be.
Part three. Denunciation from Ukraine.
Moreover, Vrublevsky drew everyone's attention to the above-mentioned document from the Main Directorate of Economic Security and Combating Corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, on the basis of which such serious accusations were made. Having studied the document, Pavel Olegovich pointed out that the document, for all its unconditional beauty, does not contain direct evidence from any eyewitnesses that fraud took place at all. Behind twelve pages of legal stupidity and the human laziness of everyone to read it, lies the fact that, apart from links to a number of anonymous resources that claim that king-donate are scammers, there is no other even the slightest confirmation of this at all. Vrublevsky understood this faster than the others for the simple reason that he had previously encountered these very anonymous sites and they turned out to be administered by Ukrainian citizens.
With which he happily remained in custody together with Belyaev for a good year and a half. Because he was right. Which is what the next year and a half and then the entire trial will show.
Akimov was “locked up” under house arrest, for greater fear, he was forbidden to take walks, and student Matvey received a written undertaking not to leave. "Pre-trial" Somov was separated into a separate proceeding and kept under house arrest for a year.
A year and a half has passed. During this time, the situation has changed insignificantly. An employee of the Moscow UFSB, a certain Mikhail Polyakov, who carried out his own intrigue and wrote a general report on Vrublevsky, ended up in jail himself. Apparently, it was he who checked the entire VanGud story as part of another story - allegedly Vrublevsky was the administrator of a popular "kompromat" channel, as part of which they also checked fraud of VanGood. So, when Vrublevsky was arrested, Ren TV, which had access to the investigation even at the time of the first search, showed footage from the businessman's house and stated: "The alleged administrator of the Infobomba Telegram channel has been arrested." But later it turned out that this channel was created by the FSB officers themselves (Dokuchaeva), Vrublevsky was naturally not involved in this, which he had spoken about publicly more than once before, and senator Khinshtein, close to the investigation, was forced to state that indeed "there was a mistake" - the owners of this channel are allegedly abroad. But the total number of Vangood victims grew to 26 people, and then to 29, then the investigation added 8 more people to them, who, according to their testimony, do not remember anything at all, and suddenly, for these eight people, charges under Article 158 (theft) were added to Article 159. The logic is ironclad - since the money went to Vangood, but he doesn't remember anything, therefore the money was stolen. Logical, right?! It's funny that for the first six months the investigator was still stony-faced in court about extending the arrestees' preventive measures, waiting for the results of the analysis of one hundred thousand transactions from Sber. Probably he didn't wait. "Having weighed everything carefully" - that was sarcasm, the investigation added a new article to the charges of fraud and theft of 537 thousand rubles in total from 37 people. As it turned out, the gang also legalized these same 537 thousand rubles. How do you think the criminal geniuses managed to do this? You know, not everyone can first cheat for 400 thousand rubles, then steal another hundred thousand from the goal of increasing their own liability, and not stopping at the achieved result, also legalize all this money. This requires skill. But since, as we know, it was an organized crime group that was involved, the “success” was predetermined - according to the case materials, the legalization was carried out by sending “fake messages about the purpose of payment” to the banks, and this was done by nothing less than “modifying the ChronoPay software”. To be honest and without jokes, what exactly the investigation wanted to say with this accusation, probably no one has understood at all. A set of letters. Perhaps it was meant that since the aforementioned victims, according to their words, entered their cards somewhere else, and not on the king-donate website, and the website allowed them to do this, then the transactions were “laundered”. However, these are only very figurative guesses, since apart from the lines of the accusation, from which no one understands a word, the investigation did not provide any other explanation, evidence or any analysis of these same lines in any form. So the accused got another article for the same ill-fated half a million rubles from 37 people - money laundering (Article 174 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Not content with this, before submitting the material to court, the investigation charged the accused with a completely amazing story. You can't stop there. Having managed to break the law three times, and on serious charges, for the same half a million rubles, you need to move forward in your criminal career.
"In order to realize their criminal intent no later than 04/25/2019 in In Moscow, a more precise time and place have not been established, under unknown circumstances, P.O. Vrublevsky, acting out of personal self-interest, developed and subsequently constantly adjusted a criminal plan for the preparation and commission of these crimes, which provided for the dissemination of deliberately false advertising information on the Internet, addressed to an unlimited number of people, with offers of various property benefits subject to the transfer of funds to the bank accounts of organizations controlled by him (Vrublevsky P.O.), at the same time, the use of special software that allows such transfers to be made through Internet acquiring (a method of accepting payments through a payment form in real time on a website on the Internet)."
It turned out that, according to the investigation, attention, it will be unclear, but this is normal - if these 37 people (!) did not match the purpose of the payment, that is, they allegedly paid for streams in VanGood, but in fact, fraud in some online lottery was allegedly paid for, and if the CEO of VanGood, whoever he was, Akimova or her brother, generally believed that this legal entity was doing something else, then for some reason the other hundred thousand payers also did not match the purpose of the payment. Cool? That's it! Why - is completely unknown. And if it didn't correspond, then pay attention, the payment orders of VanGood itself, sent from its accounts further to banks, didn't correspond to reality. Roughly speaking, if VanGud deceived 37 people, then it deceived all 100,000 people. Well, that's it. Well, that's the logic. And if it deceived 100,000 people, then their money sent further from VanGud accounts somewhere else and to someone, and it is not known where or to whom, was also of course sent by deception. So, who exactly and who deceived and in what?! You ask us, reader, what is this, excuse the crazy ravings of a madman?!
That's right, reader. Nobody understands literally a single line of this crazy ravings.
We, of course, attach the text of this indictment to this publication.
Following this iron logic, the investigation, unraveling this terrible tangle of crimes, recognized all VanGood payment orders as fake. Right away and that's it. Which included, as expected, payments for office rent, company payments for everything and everyone, salaries and even, and this is the funniest thing, guaranteed for the first time in the history of Russia - payments to the Russian Tax Service for taxes. Yes, reader, YES, they were able to do this, for the first time in history, real payments for taxes to the Russian tax service were recognized by the investigation as fake. In order not to limit themselves to this surrealism, the investigation also recognized the transfer of the access token to VanGood online banks, carried out by proxy between all the parties involved, as illegal.
Wasn't that enough for you? And if that wasn't enough for you, they included the wording in the indictment "in this way the funds were withdrawn from controlled circulation." When the lawyers read this text of the indictment, one of the first impressions was that this was some kind of childish exercise from a school for children with dementia syndrome. One of the most experienced lawyers in the country, not from the defense team, read, reread, did it again, then again and finally, smoothing his gray hair and glasses, asked "This same money was withdrawn, damn it, to accounts in Sberbank and VTB? Is it they who recognized Sberbank and VTB as uncontrolled circulation?" We emphasize, reader. For your understanding. No one conducted any examinations of all these odious allegations of the investigation. No one ever confiscated a single phone from any victim. All thirty-seven people were recognized by them solely on the basis of their words and nothing more. No one has ever undertaken to confirm the bold assertion that the ChronoPay software was modified by anything or in any way, especially with the purpose of committing four serious crimes for half a million rubles - these are entirely just the words of the investigation. No one has ever checked the counterfeit of either the bank's tokens or the payment orders of the VanGood company.
And this whole story in this form went to court for hearings in the Khamovnichesky Court. The judge, who could have heard this from the very beginning at the preliminary hearing, did not do so, since she simply cancelled it contrary to the law. Moreover, according to rumors, this is not a special attitude to this case, this is luck, since this is her personal understanding of the law, through which all her defendants go.
And already in court, real hell began. But readers, this hell is what made this amazing story worth reading. Because in its own way, it was only a prelude.
The court finally examined the testimony of the victims. Those same 37 people. And for reasons that you will understand after reading further, they asked to hear them in court.
In general, Russian law strictly does not allow a verdict to be passed if the victims did not appear in court, or the prosecutor's office did not read out their testimony, which is possible either in the event of their death and similar reasons, or at the request of the accused. That is the law. That was the law, before Vrublevsky, to be more precise. Previously, this right had always been unshakable, since it is part of Russia's international agreements, which states that any accused must have the right to question the person who is accusing him. For reference. And smile. In the USSR, even in the USSR, the law worked exactly the same way. But the USSR can be forgiven for this mistake - after all, Pavel Olegovich was still little. He simply did not have time.
Of the 37 victims, five people appeared in court. FIVE. The rest did not appear. Why? We tell you what the testimony of 37 victims in the VanGud case turned out to be.
For the first time, we are publishing the materials of their interrogations. Judge for yourself, as they say.
There are at least six completely different stories told by these 37 people. These are completely, absolutely, different stories in their essence, which is also confirmed by the nature of their transactions. So three people, Maganov, Molostvov and Romanenko, quite clearly describe absolutely identical events, a certain crypto exchange, or Tradefond.com or Goldusbitcoin.com, where they paid the same amount down to the kopeck and ruble for activation - 2287 rubles, and put 5587 rubles into the account, after which they refused to withdraw the winnings themselves.
Interrogation of the victim Maganov:
Additional Interrogation of the victim Maganov:
Interrogation of the victim Molostvov:
Interrogation of the victim Romanenko:
Meanwhile, citizen Ilya Voronov, a former scholarship student (a scholarship of 100 rubles, as he touchingly reports during interrogation), and now suddenly a senior specialist of course at Sberbank in his village of Demino in the Nizhny Novgorod region, unexpectedly adds amazing colors to their story. And what is somewhat comical in this case, may this victim forgive us, he lives at the characteristic address: Kashchenko Street. The thing is that Ilya Voronov did not play any cryptocurrencies at all, but he also somehow managed to spend absolutely identical amounts twice - 2,287 rubles and 5,587 rubles. Is this possible mathematically and statistically? We do not know, but what is even more amazing is that Ilya Voronov himself claims that the theft of his funds occurred due to his desire to bet on sports! And for what reason did he study the Internet and register on the 1Cupis.ru website, after which, in his opinion, the money disappeared. And this is simply amazing, an amazing example, because either Ilya did not understand the wishes of the investigation, or (which is more likely) - Ilya, a scholarship holder, a 100 ruble scholarship, a future chief specialist of Sber, understood everything correctly - it was necessary to tell the investigation about some bets! Which he did in good faith. The only problem is that 1Cupis.ru, aka the First Payment and Betting Management Center, is the largest legal state payment operator for the gambling industry in Russia in 2020. Well, Ilya did not fully understand the task. Or the operative who conducted the survey did not fully understand the task. Bets are bets, what difference does it make on 1Xbet or on exchange rates?!
Interrogation of the victim Voronov:
Which begs the question - such an unfortunate oversight of the investigation happened only with Ilya or with Maganov , Molostvov and Romanenko too? Surprisingly, the story of betting on exchange rates is continued by the victim Mr. Keller. This gentleman played something on cryptocurrency rates on a certain Qawai website for two months, but with different amounts. His several thousand rubles were obviously very, very hard for the gang to get. And not quickly.
Interrogation of the victim Keller:
Even more shocking is the story of the victim, citizen Dykina Marina Anatolyevna, head of the branch of OPS-7 of the Russian Post from Zarinsk. Her statement is a real detective story, which has everything except a love story! And the swindler who called her on the phone, and the mathematical accuracy of the calculations and the literary style and even the descriptions of the characters, at the end of her presentation you involuntarily wait for the continuation, how did they deceive her further and who? In a glorious post office far, far away in Russia, for an amount of several thousand rubles. But be that as it may - this is a typical story from a series of frauds in the field of social. engineering and technical sciences of Ukrainian call centers, what does Vangood have to do with it, rates on exchange rates and the whole story in general, is not even remotely clear.
Interrogation of the victim Dykina:
However, the score is equalized by Mr. victim Izikin, who also spent the ill-fated 2287 rubles and 5587 rubles, but in his opinion they were simply stolen from him, he did not enter anything anywhere on the Internet or any other network, thus the informal score between the victims who remember Tradefond or Goldusdbitcoin and the victims who remember something else, but entered the same amounts to the penny twice, including the victim from the actions of the state TsUPIS, in his opinion, becomes 4:2.
Interrogation of the victim Izikin:
That is, evaluate this. Dyatlov Pass is "resting". The victims tell completely different stories, but spend the same amounts to the penny, in the same sequence.
Already the third, and fundamentally new story, this time about some quiz on the Internet, and each in their own way, is told by 10 victims: Koroleva, Kozharova, Vyrupaeva, Khristoforova, Azitova, Titov, Tarasova, Motriy and Gudinov.
It is difficult to count exactly how many there are. Perhaps there should have been even 11, but this could only be established by questioning the victim Khristoforova.
So, Diana Khristoforova, 28 years old, born in 1996, a native of the village of Symakh, in the Meino-Kanlalassky district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), a master of eyelash extensions, a salon with an atypical name for the village of Symakh, Meino-Kanlalassky district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) - Nadin Beauty, played some online quiz not alone. She involved her close friend Matryona Semenova in the entertainment, and Matryona entered her own card, and sometimes Diana entered Matryona's card, probably out of passion for the game, the other way around, and the girls spent 25 thousand rubles of total damage together, about half each. It is not clear why the Ministry of Internal Affairs exclusively took Diana for the victim, which ultimately led to the fact that only Diana got the money back. And the funniest thing is that she is eager to get Matryona's share now!
And so, these ten or eleven people told a completely different story than the previous ones. In their case, they all participated in some online quiz. The paradox is that they naturally do not remember which one. Do you get the trick? As they say in Comedy Club.
The fourth story, believe it or not, is also completely and completely different, told to us by citizens Struchkova, Kondakov, Vyatkina and Orlova. All of them became victims, according to them, of some scam in the RuNet on VAT and personal income tax refunds. However, here's what's surprising - both Orlova and Vyatkina, according to them, quite successfully got their funds back long before anyone was held accountable. According to Vyatkina, her card was insured and the refund came immediately, therefore the victim should have been different, that is, the insurer, in short, it is not clear even with such ... the logic of the investigation, what these 2 people are doing on the list of victims. This was the fourth story.
Two people stand apart from them, and this is the fifth, already in its own way, a different story. These are people who do not remember at all, absolutely, in any way and nothing, but are registered under 159. And not under 158. Why? Only God knows.
It is good to commit crimes or go on reconnaissance with such people. These are Bloshchina and Perevala. However, Bloshchina clearly remembers the Honor phone that was subsequently stolen from her, and therefore without it, even in theory, she would not be able to remember anything except 1,600 rubles in damages, although she is not going to forget this specific amount, as is the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, having recognized her as a victim.
But if Bloshchina at least remembers 1,600 rubles, a pensioner from Baku, born in 1963, Larisa Aleksandrovna Perevala, does not even remember the amount, to be honest, only one thing is clear from her survey - the only thing she remembers is that she does not remember anything. The lady is old school. Made of steel. They don’t make them like that anymore.
And of course, all the victims under Article 158, like Startseva, are finally listed separately.
And that’s not all! There is also the last, seventh story. Namely, a certain payment for charity orienteering, but only citizen Michel suffered like that.
And so. To summarize, readers. Before us are seven completely different amazing stories, different in all conceivable aspects, for example, in the story with the return of VAT and personal income tax, payment to a certain lawyer appears almost everywhere, which in itself is not at all clear how it is connected with fraud. However, citizen Orlova added a federal scope to the stories with personal income tax - according to her, she saw an advertisement for the return of personal income tax on the TV channel Russia and only then turned on the Internet. That's it.
On the other hand, some victims with other stories clearly paid the same amounts as cryptocurrency players, and some of them, according to them, even interacted with real people, presumably scammers, to which the victim Dykina devoted an entire story worthy of literary awards.
Imagine the full scope of the grinning criminal genius Vrublevsky! Not only did he create an organized crime group to steal half a million rubles, clearly intentionally committing four serious crimes at once, his criminal genius knew no rest, since in order to deceive these 37 people for these half a million rubles, he developed SEVEN detailed criminal schemes, judging by the scale of which, he attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of perpetrators. It is strange that not thirty-seven and that no one was killed.
However...how can I say, let's read on -)
Part 7. The Witches of Salem. Arina.
If you found the stories with the victims amazing, then the story of the girl Arina stands out among them. This is simply unsurpassed nonsense. The last time such nonsense was heard in court was somewhere in the fifteenth century, but history also knows of more recent cases of children testifying in criminal cases. Perhaps the most famous such story is the Salem Witch Trial, which happened much later, just some three hundred years ago.
Interrogation of the victim Litvinova:
Interrogation of the witness Litvinov (husband):
Interrogation of the victim Litvinova:
The victim Litvinova stated that she heard from her husband, and he from his daughter, who took her parents' phone number without asking before going to bed, that the daughter had been deceived in the evening when buying upgrades for a virtual doll on the Internet. No, this is not a joke. We are attaching the document. It is not even that important to us that it is not entirely clear what the fraud is, and in this case we can even close our eyes to the fact that, like all 37 victims, this story is not confirmed by anything. Why? Because at the time of the events, the girl Arina was a full FIVE YEARS OLD. The question of whether a five-year-old child is capable of entering SMS confirmation codes for a series of repeat purchases would be interesting and debatable (yes, that was sarcasm), if it weren't for the fact that according to the statements on the mother's card, in any case, someone is lying - the transactions lasted two days, and not one day, as described in the mother's story, from the words of the father, from the words of the daughter.
A moment of rest. Here we will digress and ask. What kind of morally low people do you have to be, or complete idiots who do not know how and do not want to read the materials, in order to use the testimony of a five-year-old girl in 2024?!!
What is going on in the heads of the court and prosecutor's office employees if they stoop to such things?!! Do you think, reader, that these people can serve even for a minute in government bodies?
What are the courts, prosecutor's office and investigative bodies trying to achieve by using such victims?! To whom, what and how and who proves?! Explain.
Or do you want to say that the unrivaled criminal genius Vrublevsky, according to the laws of the genre, was simply obliged to add to the list of all the unthinkable serious crimes for half a million rubles to his track record the daring, cynical deception of a five-year-old girl? Is that what you want to say?!
Then why wasn't the girl Arina allowed into court? Wouldn't it have been wonderful if she had pointed her finger at Pavel Olegovich and declared "burn him!" Or did some voice intervene and politely reprimand him - "guys, you've either completely and irrevocably gone mad, "the cuckoo's been shot off", you know, or you've mixed up your century, you're in your fifteenth, thank you"
Part 8. Explanation of the mystery of the victims and their failure to appear in court. The Immaculate Conception.
Of all 37 victims, Romanenko, the victim in the story with the crypto-exchange, appeared in court, and during questioning in court, she explained that in fact she only assumed that she would not be able to withdraw her money from the virtual account on the exchange and did not even try. Therefore, what it had to do with it and what kind of deception of whom - it was not clear. Vyatkina, the victim in the story with tax deductions, appeared, and as it turned out, she was deceived (or not) by a certain citizen who introduced himself as a lawyer in Telegram, with whom she communicated personally in Telegram! Nobody understood what this has to do with Internet sites. Victim Keller was also in court and told a completely different story, also about playing on exchange rates. This is the only victim, attention, this is the only victim whose story at least contains, albeit unconfirmed, deception, since a certain Internet site did not allow him to withdraw his winnings. Besides these three victims (sorry for the humor, but in case the reader is not good at higher mathematics, we will tell you that three is for example, two plus one, or let's say one times three) two more ladies appeared in court, bringing the total number of victims in court to an unimaginable number of five people. These were Kozharova and Koroleva. Both suffered, in their opinion, from a certain quiz on Instagram and both brought even the judge, the prosecutor, and especially the defense, into a real full-stop. The fact is that Kozharova told a crime previously unknown on planet Earth. In her opinion, she paid for QUESTIONS in a certain quiz on Instagram. What the hell did she mean, what the hell questions did she pay for, what were these ill-fated questions about and who asked them and why is it necessary to pay for questions in a quiz at all, no matter how hard the whole hall tried, Mrs. Kozharova could not explain at all. As a result, Kozharova burst into tears, and everyone wanted to cry from despair in the ongoing farce - the judge, the prosecutor, the defense, and even the accused. For two hours, everyone present in the courtroom tried in any way to get at least some explanation from the citizen about what she meant. However, it seems that at other court hearings it turned out that someone mistakenly forgot one of the statements on Kozharova's card in the case materials, and from which it follows, to put it mildly, unambiguously (we provide the statement here), that Kozharova actually refused her payments and therefore could not lose any money. This issue, like a thousand others, remained unresolved.
Kozharova's fantastic success was repeated by the victim Koroleva. Koroleva also saw some kind of lottery somewhere on Instagram, whatever it was, and when trying to pay for something, the payment page showed Koroleva an error. Apparently, something broke. But according to her, some rubles were written off from Koroleva's card. No matter how hard the reader tries, he will not guess what the she did in this situation. It would seem that the payment form does not work, it is the right time to move away from the communication device. But Mrs. Koroleva, on the contrary, did a "form refresh", that is, updated the payment page. In the most amazing and fantastic way, this led to a second write-off, according to her! When asked whether she entered the SMS confirmation code again, she confidently stated that she did not. What broke in the Universe and the structure of existence so that Koroleva's money was written off without an SMS code remains a mystery. And this could be considered a coincidence, if not for one "but". If it seemed difficult for you to assume that she updated a non-working payment form, then you will never and for nothing guess how many more times she repeated this. Reader! Koroleva, disregarding all conceivable laws of logic and high technology, updated the non-working payment form NINE TIMES. And each time, according to her words, it led to the money being written off without entering an SMS. There are situations in life when women's stories are usually believed. Such is the tradition. Let's say about the immaculate conception. But why the court did not immediately send all this waste paper to the fiery hyena after Koroleva's speech - truly no one knows.
After this idiotic fiasco, not a single victim came to court, despite their summons to court through "drive", that is, by force. In fact, we are sure that no one carried out any drives, of course, and did not even try. Since the following clearly happened - it became extremely clear from the five stories of these people that in the very best case, these are people who simply do not remember anything that happened to them on penny transactions several years ago, which is not surprising, and they tell the first thing that comes to mind.
In the worst case, and we are sure that this was the case, and their first testimonies, all 37 persons - this is not a bad memory at all, but stories written down under the dictation of operatives, which the operatives themselves quickly composed, having picked up similar stories on the Internet.
We prove this in detail. Firstly, if you google for a second or two, it will very quickly become clear that during the period of the events described from December 2019 to March 2020, both sites that are indicated in the stories about the currency game - Tradefond.com and Goldusdbitcoin.com did not exist. Traces of such "scams" can be found on the Internet, but for other periods of time - six months BEFORE the events described and A YEAR LATER, but not during this period. These specific domain names generally appeared much later.
Of course, the transactions identical to the last penny of 2,287 rubles and 5,587 rubles in the scheme described above cannot be repeated in any other scheme - this is statistically impossible. It is obvious that in fact all the people who paid these amounts bought some identical product. The story about the fraud with the First CUPIS is simply living proof of forgery, since it is absolutely obvious that the operative who prompted the "victim" what to declare simply did not understand what bets were being discussed. Never and in no way could the CUPIS have had the slightest relation to all the allegedly occurring events described. It was for this reason that the court interrupted the summonses of the victims and for no other. But the law prohibits under such circumstances, to pass a sentence (except for an acquittal).
Reader, remember above we showed a report from the Main Directorate of Economic Security and Combating Corruption? This report precedes the interrogation of these victims. Moreover, this report also indicates the alleged victims, and even at first glance it is immediately clear that these are different people. An attentive reader will also find in this report a description of several fraud schemes - it was precisely under these schemes that they tried to fit the stories of unfortunate people who, in fact, naturally, did not remember anything. The problem is that obviously neither the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who wrote the report, nor the future victims, had ever seen the schemes that were so beautifully described, and this became clear in court as clear as day, after questioning the first five people. That is why the court interrupted the summoning of the victims, contrary to the law.
In court, the testimony of 12 people was read out with the permission of the accused. Namely, all 8 people under Article 158 (theft), below you will understand why, and four people under Article 159, whose interrogations at the stage of the investigation itself boiled down to the phrase "I don't remember anything at all, that is, absolutely nothing."
Thus, only five victims out of thirty-seven were in court. One person, think about it, one person out of thirty-seven victims out of a million transactions, we repeat - one in a million transactions, stated in court that he was deceived. Two of the five could not explain how they could have been deceived, since they themselves refused to complete their transactions, and two told such unthinkable nonsense that it was embarrassing even to describe it.
Part 9. Complete failure. Banks' responses under Article 158, "pre-trial lawyer" and the fiasco with the disk.
Nobody understood why, when the prosecutor's office refused to call the victims to court, and half of them did not show up (!), the case continued at all. The saga of calling the victims lasted almost a year of the trial.
The defendants asked the court, and the court requested from the banks that accepted payments for VanGood using ChronoPay, to provide data on whether VanGood SMS verification (3-D Secure) was configured in the Visa, MasterCard, MIR payment systems. This configuration is carried out by banks, ChronoPay did not have and could not have access to this function. Of course, all VanGood terminals were configured through confirmation of payments by SMS. In fact, with rare exceptions, all online stores in Russia are configured. The fact is that the SMS verification system (3D-Secure) exists in the world and in Russia for exactly one purpose - to confirm that a person personally made a payment using his card. This is the only purpose of this system. According to the rules of payment systems, if a payment is confirmed via SMS, it is considered that the person made it himself, with the only exception - the victim's mobile phone was stolen.
After the banks' responses, the defendants demanded that the prosecution under Article 158 be stopped, since even theoretically, due to SMS verification, theft is impossible. Moreover, as it turned out, the Moscow City Court is inundated with responses from courts of such alleged victims who sued banks for not remembering the payment, and naturally, the position in this regard is, to put it mildly, uniform throughout the world, SMS verification means the impossibility of the crime of theft. Denying this in the banking world is equivalent to claiming that the Earth is flat. This is, so to speak, a truism. In addition to the theoretical minimum, the court was also provided with practical evidence - out of eight victims of the theft, half of them claimed fraud, not theft, during interrogations during the investigation, and moreover, according to the extracts in the case, the victims SUCCESSFULLY CONTINUED to make other purchases with these cards. How is that?! The card was stolen for a short time and then returned?! In other words, the people obviously did not lose access to the cards.
The court decided to dismiss this motion under Article 158 as well. And here's why. At the same time, the second judge of the Khamovnichesky Court was considering the case of the "pre-trial defendant". Who signed everything without reading. Why do we write that he did not read? Because at the hearings of the main case, as soon as he was asked about the elements of the theft, he, without a second's hesitation, immediately cut off "there is no theft and could not have been. It is not technically possible." And then calmly and thoroughly explained why it was not possible. But Judge Mishchenko in the Khamovnichesky Court in the case of the "pre-trial defendant" herself was not satisfied with this statement, since the pre-trial agreement was signed by the entire Prosecutor General's Office, unlike the main case, when the Prosecutor General's Office had apparently already figured out what the catch was and pushed the issue to the city. Judge Mishchenko decided that if the Prosecutor General's Office signed something, then there is no other way, even if the crime is impossible even theoretically, and ultimately forced the "pre-trial defendant" to somehow confirm this stupidity once again and condemned it. As a result, the trial of the "pre-trial defendant" himself was considered for a good six months, given that such trials usually take a week. We do not know who tried or is trying to hide what here, but the fact is that the "pre-trial defendant", who had previously served a year of house arrest and came to court on his own from at home, suddenly given three years of real term. Naturally, the guy was promised a suspended sentence on behalf of the Prosecutor General's Office and he immediately filed an appeal for mitigation, since he was deceived. Which caused another problem, since without his sentence, which has entered into legal force, it cannot be taken into account in the sentence of the other defendants. The rare stupidity with Somov's term led to the fact that the main case remained for a long time without "pre-trial" and, as we heard, to a serious scandal in the Prosecutor General's Office, where in the end the Prosecutor General personally expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that in some cases of computer crime there is no evidence at all. This happened because although in Russia "pre-trial" cases are deceived by anyone and everyone, there is no such practice and cannot be in the Prosecutor General's Office itself. And therefore, there are no appeals.
And then suddenly the whole process came to a standstill, having encountered a fundamentally different problem. A problem that not only no one expected, but could not even imagine. Remember, reader, we told you that due to random events, the seized ChronoPay servers were a single-copy database? At the trial, this led to the problem that the defense could not verify the history of these same 37 victims from their data, despite the fact that Kozharova's case clearly showed that it was necessary to verify this. However, all attempts to obtain the servers, and these attempts included complaints to everyone from Medvedev and Putin to the Pope, ended in a comedy. The only one of all who heard the requests of the accused was the "inquisition" court itself in Khamovniki. How so? A mystery. Apparently, the judge misheard, and the petition to hand over the servers was satisfied. Which in turn caused "paralysis" in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. After a month of deliberation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs responded to the court that it could not fulfill the court's decision. Well, just like that. Do you know why?! Because the servers are too cumbersome. Just in case, we are talking about one rack with a blade system, approximately knee-high.
Despairing of just looking at the history of these damn transactions, the accused and the defense dug into the case materials. And were surprised to find that the investigation had never requested the transfer of funds directly from these victims anywhere. That is, there is no verification that their funds were ever received in VanGood on any of the accounts in the case. If, for example, the transactions were cancelled, then from the case materials, with one exception, it is impossible to see this in any document in the 65 volumes of the case. From the very beginning, the case included two expert assessments of the victims' damages. And from the very beginning, formally, both assessments contradicted each other. And formally, this is utter wildness, but in practice, this happened, since the investigation twice requested statements from Sberbank for the victims, but for different periods of time. However, for the same reason, apart from the second disk received from Sberbank, with statements for half of the victims, these write-offs are not present in any other document. Neither digital nor paper. The defendants asked the court to independently obtain statements from Sberbank, were refused, they asked to obtain facts of funds being credited from the banks that made payments for VanGood, but were also refused - apparently, the court itself is not sure whether the money was actually credited from the victims to the defendants. Having no other options, the defendants asked to check the statements from the second disk itself, and it turned out that this disk was not in the case either. It was stored in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, from where the court finally obtained it. Omitting the details of a billion formal and factual problems of the prosecution with the registration of this unfortunate disk, when it arrived from the investigation, it turned out that the date of file changes on it PRECEDED the date of creation of these documents in the bank. By a good month. This date precedes by a day even the moment when these statements were first thought of, and not what was created.
To put it simply, the disk turned out to be a forgery as obvious as day. And this means that there is not only no fact of fraud or theft in the case, but half of the victims do not know whether even a penny was written off at all!!!
Can you imagine the whole range of feelings of all those present at that moment?!? A Google request for the words "the most ridiculous case in the world" will give exactly this situation in the very near future, leaving far behind the unrivaled examples of human stupidity in the past. Science knows the methods, and therefore the prosecutor's office and the court will get to them, how to explain that non-rewritable disks were rewritten, even if this requires amazingly beautiful descriptions! Like the investigator who deliberately knocked down the date on his own computer and persistently worked on the same computer, simultaneously disabling all conceivable alerts of modern programs. Other explanations are possible, but science obviously does not yet know how to change files before the date of creation of the document (extracts) itself, this is time travel.
The court battle over the date of the files lasted a month and came to nothing. The judge decided to consider this fact at the sentencing. This is completely illegally, because if the judge believed that the laws of physics apply in the Universe, the trial could not continue - because this would also mean, de facto, that the persons present are illegally in custody.
Part 10. The Finale. And Conclusions.
Finally, the trial came to an end. The prosecutor's office took a break for additions, the defense is waiting - without the victims and a solution to the disk issue, regardless of everything else, the trial cannot continue in principle by law. In general, the reader sees the situation. We have presented it with all the documents, without hiding a single detail, with the exception of those that have a purely emotional meaning, but are devoid of practical legal meaning.
It is important to understand the following. If such a verdict is passed, whether it is overturned or not, this will mean that:
1. In Russia, contrary to the law, it is no longer necessary to verify the testimony of the victims in any way. This is an absolutely unthinkable situation, since it allows anyone who sold something to anyone to be locked up on any slip of the tongue without checking the circumstances. This is obvious madness.
2. In Russia, the SMS payment verification system no longer matters. Any Russian can report to the Ministry of Internal Affairs that his funds were stolen because he does not remember how they were written off and become a victim.
3. In Russia, the testimony of five-year-old girls is accepted as victims in economic and other cases. Without verification.
4. In Russia, it makes no sense to formalize any evidence in any way, since it has been established that evidence can appear even before it arose in the historical period.
5. In Russia, it is absolutely not necessary to break the law yourself - any of your clients can do this, which means you are a group.
6. For any transaction of just a few thousand rubles, about which you do not remember anything, you can be recognized as a victim and they can force you (!) to fly to courts all over the country for years at your expense. Even if you are a five-year-old girl. And then, surprise, if it turns out that you were not a victim (as you tried to tell the authorities), you will be accused of false denunciation under Article 306 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
7. If you are an employee of the authorities or the court and the prosecutor's office and someone is trying to restrict you from violating the law, this no longer makes any sense, since the law no longer exists in principle.
When the materials related to this case were published last time, one of the comments from readers on social networks turned out to be so good that we put it in the title of this story.
Tell me, this is Netflix, right?
Also provided to your attention are two reports about the results of the operational investigative activities of employees of the Main Directorate of Economic Security and Anti-Corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia:
