Russia is being haunted by a new and very strange phenomenon: thousands of ordinary people — teenagers and pensioners alike — have been arrested after committing what could be described as acts of civil resistance, from arson attacks on military commissariats to splashing paint on FSB buildings and facilities.
And yet the attackers are not members of some fearsome opposition movement — most are completely apolitical. Instead, those involved have been duped via social media, primarily Telegram, or through phone calls.
What’s new here? It’s that the state has created perverse incentives for ordinary Russians that are now being exploited by scammers with a keen insight into the Russian mindset. These include Ukrainian intelligence.
Those behind the attacks pretend to be officials, especially FSB secret policemen. In a country where disobedience to the regime’s orders is a criminal offense, the willingness to obey even seemingly crazed instructions is perhaps understandable.
Of course, phone scams are common, but while in the West they are mostly aimed at luring victims into providing access to bank and other accounts, in Russia they are increasingly designed to prompt victims to act: to sell their apartments, transfer assets to strangers’ accounts, and, in a growing number of cases, attack government facilities.
The Kremlin and the FSB have been making widely publicized efforts to stop these crimes, using methods ranging from explanations on state TV to raids on illegal call centers (in one recent operation carried out by the FSB in early March across 43 regions, around 200 people were detained) to banning calls from abroad.
Everyone appears to be aware of the problem: according to Kaspersky Lab data, in 2025, every second Russian was approached by phone scammers.
The methods of social engineering used in most of these cases include two key elements: the victims are told they are suspected of helping Ukraine — which means high treason charges — and perpetrators pose as representatives of the FSB.
This is how it works.
In December, a 16-year-old student was stopped by police near the City Hall in Volgodonsk, a town in southern Russia. The girl was carrying a large rucksack, which apparently drew a policeman’s attention. When she opened it, there was something inside that looked like an explosive device.
She explained to the shocked policeman, and later to FSB officers who promptly arrived at the scene, that she had been planning to pass the rucksack to a City Hall official.
According to her account, the rucksack contained money intended for the official. As it became clear later, however, the girl didn’t know what she was carrying — a device with the explosive power equivalent to 10 kg (22 lbs.) of TNT. Had it been triggered, it would have destroyed part of the building, almost certainly killing the girl.
The full story didn’t much surprise investigators. The fraudsters found her when she was purchasing goods on an online marketplace. After luring her into sharing personal data, they gained access to her accounts, including her profile on the government’s online services portal, Gosuslugi, which provides access to documents, healthcare, and other state services.
They then began to intimidate her. Presenting themselves as FSB officers, they threatened her with prison, claiming her data had been used in various serious crimes, including high treason. However, they offered her a way out if she followed their instructions.
The task seemed simple: go to a location shown in a photo, pick up a rucksack with “money,” and deliver it to a “corrupt official” on behalf of the FSB. The scam lasted several days, but she never tried to contact the police; she simply followed instructions. As she later explained, she believed she was helping the state to catch a corrupt official.
The girl’s behavior takes some explaining to non-Russians. While it seems illogical, the truth is that she displayed a very common reaction for anyone living in a society terrorized by the security services for decades. Alexey Levinson, a prominent Russian sociologist, concludes that Russian history is still a combination of the state as an apparatus of violence (Marx) and an organized propaganda apparatus (Lenin) — a cocktail that has always proven stronger than the so-called material conditions of the masses. This reality has a paralyzing effect on the ability to think critically.
The very nature of a regime built and policed by the security services has created a vulnerability — one that is increasingly being exploited by a wide range of people, from criminals to Ukrainian intelligence agencies.
The girl’s story mirrors many others in present-day Russia: while such scams usually last for days or even weeks, victims rarely attempt to contact the police or the FSB. In most cases, they feel so defenseless and powerless in the face of the state’s repressive machine that they prefer to follow instructions, however foolish, rather than question them.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in June.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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