A resident of the village of Ugolnye Kopi in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug became a victim of fraud, losing more than 2.3 million rubles while trying to invest in digital assets. The incident began in May, when a 45-year-old man met an unknown woman through a dating app. The interviewee offered him participation in highly profitable cryptocurrency investments, after which she handed over the contact of an allegedly specialized financial specialist. The attackers convinced the victim to install software on a smartphone that mimics the interface of a real crypto exchange, which was the first stage in the implementation of a complex social engineering scheme.

The mechanism of embezzlement of funds was based on the classical model of false trust formation. At the initial stage, the scammers allowed the victim to make small transactions ranging from one to ten thousand rubles, providing the appearance of stable and guaranteed profits. However, after depositing a larger amount of 50,000 rubles, access to the funds was artificially blocked. The organizers of the scheme informed the victim about a technical error and the threat of law enforcement intervention, which forced him to make ten more transfers to various bank accounts, including a final payment of 500 thousand rubles under the pretext of an emergency settlement of the situation.

Realizing the fact of deception, the victim stopped communicating with the attackers, deleted the malicious application and contacted law enforcement agencies, which promptly opened a criminal case. This incident reflects a steady trend of increasing financial damage from digital fraud in the regions of Russia. Earlier, a similar scheme was recorded in the Republic of Tyva, where a resident of the city of Kyzyl lost 5.5 million rubles invested in pseudo-crypto-currency projects. It is noteworthy that a significant part of the lost funds in that case was received by the citizen after the sale of his own residential property, which underlines the critical importance of improving the financial literacy of the population.