Fraudsters swindled a Belarusian woman out of over 52,000 rubles using the Fake Boss scheme
Telephone scammers tricked a resident of the Voronovsky district out of more than 52,000 rubles using the Fake Boss scheme.
The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on this fact.
This was reported by the press service of the Investigative Committee for the Grodno Region.
How the scammers operated
According to the investigation, on October 15, a 48-year-old resident of the Voronovsky district received a message in a messenger from a user whose first and last name matched those of her boss.
The woman was not alarmed by the fact that her boss was listed differently in her phone book. She did not check the phone number and did not call the boss back.
She was sure that she was communicating with a real boss, the Investigative Committee said.
The woman was warned that a higher-level organization was conducting an unscheduled inspection in connection with the fact that one of the employees is suspected of leaking information about colleagues in order to subsequently issue loans in their name and transfer money abroad to finance criminal organizations in Ukraine.
Then the victim was contacted by an alleged employee of the National Bank. On her instructions, the woman wrote a receipt "on non-disclosure of preliminary investigation data."
Then the fake National Bank employee told the woman that applications for loans had been sent in her name to three banks at once and that she needed to take out the loans herself in order to cancel the applications.
Having taken out loans from three banks, the woman transferred more than 38,000 rubles to the fraudsters.
The victim was then informed that a foreign currency account for $5,000 had been opened in her name and that it needed to be closed “through the legal department using an encrypted method.” The woman transferred her savings to the scammers.
In total, she was swindled out of 52,000 rubles. A few days later, another call came in about loan applications, and the woman realized that she had been deceived.
The Voronovsky District Department of the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on this fact under Part 4 of Article 209 of the Criminal Code (fraud on an especially large scale).
