Law enforcement officers of Bashkiria detained a student of Ufa college who provided assistance to fraudsters from Ukraine. This was announced on Friday, February 16, by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in the Telegram channel.

The Interior Ministry noted that a 19-year-old young man who came to Russia from Ukraine in 2022 decided to «join an illegal business.»

«According to preliminary data, the detainee still has acquaintances in his homeland who work in the call center of telephone scams. They are calling the residents of our country and extorting money from them under various pretexts,» the agency said in a publication.

The student began to search for people who are willing to provide him with their bank accounts for a small percentage. Through them, citizens’ savings stolen by fraudsters were later transferred. In addition, the suspect involved his acquaintances in illegal actions: they received money on cards, sent it to him, and the young man himself transferred the collected amount to his accomplices in Ukraine.

A criminal case has been opened against the student, he was taken into custody. The police also identified his assistant, who turned out to be a student of the same educational institution. The second young man was given a preventive measure in the form of a subscription not to leave and proper behavior.

Earlier, on February 5, the Russian Foreign Ministry told Izvestia that at the moment there are over 1 thousand fraudulent call centers on the territory of Ukraine engaged in extortion of money from ordinary citizens. The department shared that in November last year, Hungary recognized that most of the funds were stolen by phone scammers from Ukraine.

On December 29, the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine announced the disclosure of a large-scale network of fraudulent call centers with an annual turnover of UAH 3 billion ($78.9 million). According to the department, the scammers conducted criminal activities not only in the country, but also in Europe and the United States. The investigation found out that the call center staff consisted of more than 2.5 thousand operators.