Scammers are common in most countries, and modern technology unwittingly aids in schemes by allowing perpetrators to hide behind screens.
Scams are constantly present online, whether you get an SMS informing you that your long-lost inheritance has been located or a DMs from an account you suspect telling you that you won a sizeable sum of money without participating in any competitions.
According to “Oddity Central’’, a Russian man was scammed out of his life’s savings, and also instructed to set a bank on fire.
Early in February, it was reported that Moscow police had captured a 48-year-old man from the Russian town of Ruza for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail into a Sberbank branch in the Russian capital.
“Bank employees were able to put out the flames before the firefighters arrived on the scene and police quickly identified and detained the perpetrator,’’ said Oddity Central.
The man whose identity has supposedly not been disclosed, allegedly told the police that, a while back, he had been contacted by someone who introduced themselves as a “representative of Russia’s largest bank” and began telling him that his account had been linked to suspicious activity.
This representative managed to persuade the alleged victim that scammers were attempting to steal money from his account within the bank, and that the best way to stop this was to transfer the money into safe accounts managed by reliable bank staff.
Over several days, the unsuspecting man transferred all of his savings about 1 million rubles (R245K) into several accounts provided by the alleged Sberbank representative.
However, the alleged scammers were not at all done with the victim and wanted to toy with him further. In an unusual twist, the scammers allegedly convinced their victim that the only way to expose the people who were supposedly attempting to steal his money was to set fire to the Sberbank branch from which they operated.
Surprisingly, the man followed their instructions and threw a Molotov cocktail inside the bank when it was empty. It’s unclear how this was supposed to expose the scammers, but that’s what he told detectives.
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