A fitting epilogue for this story could be an old saying: as long as there are trusting people in the world, fraud will always pay. That isn’t to call the hero of this story naive — not at all. But in a scammer’s logic, any trusting person is someone who simply has to be deceived. A criminal mindset, there’s no other way to put it. Fortunately, the law is guided by universal rules rather than by a victim’s personal traits, which means even the most trusting person has a right to have their interests defended. Our firm’s lawyers managed to defend the hero of this story against what, at first glance, looked like entirely reasonable claims from the police. Things could have gone differently. But let’s take it from the beginning.
This isn’t the first time we’ve written about internet fraud. The range of schemes is quite wide, and the trends shift from time to time — you could almost publish a glossy magazine, “Scammer’s Vogue.” Judge for yourself: at one point, most crimes in the digital space were straightforward, like a burglary — hack the bank’s security, steal the money; hack the credit cards, steal the money. Every such crime caused real harm to victims, but it also served as a kind of lesson: programmers improved their security systems, and financial institutions turned into digital fortresses. Scammers switched to selling goods that didn’t exist. Today’s fashionable trend is the “wealthy suitor” — usually an “American” or an “Englishman” who suddenly falls passionately in love with the owner of some Facebook account. He is invariably the owner of a large company, or a general, awash in money but lacking in family happiness. Most of the victims are women from the former USSR, raised on fairy tales about Cinderellas and princes. The story usually ends with the ardent admirer wanting to precede his arrival with a very expensive gift — except, as luck would have it, the delivery of this royal treasure has to be paid for by the beloved. And really, compared to the value of the gift, a few hundred euros seems like a trifle. Except the box turns out to be empty, and the couriers represent a postal service that doesn’t exist. The second most fashionable current trend is the “parcel mule” scheme. If suitor scams mostly originate in Turkey, “parcel mule” schemes are a Russian invention — and that’s what this story is about.
But first, it’s worth pointing out why fraud never disappears from this world. A scammer always plays on basic human instincts: the thirst for easy gain (hunger) and sexual attraction. The famous Soviet psychologist Vygotsky said that higher nervous activity is capable of controlling base impulses — but sometimes critical thinking fails, and then…
The hero of this story is a student. Like all students, he was short on money and not opposed to earning a bit extra. And, naturally, the difficulties of youthful hormones played their part too. Dmitriy spent his free time on VKontakte, a social network popular among Russians. There, in one of the job-search groups, he saw a photo of an extremely pretty girl and, as they say, fell for her. The young lady turned out to be a manager at a large Moscow company — or so she introduced herself. Dmitriy was generous with compliments, the manager from Moscow was flattered, and Dmitriy in turn wasn’t left without attention either. After a brief flirtatious correspondence, Dmitriy received a job offer from the company belonging to his imagined love interest. Psychologists have long known the phenomenon of “secondary goals,” where a person, say, chooses a profession or enrolls at a university, and life in that profession simply doesn’t work out — driven not by a clear sense of their own interests, but by a vague, hidden desire to resemble someone or to be around certain people. The primary goal stays hidden. It was the same here: had it not been for this youthful infatuation with a Moscow manager’s account, Dmitriy might have taken a different job. But as it happened, Dmitriy answered: “Yes!”
It turned out that one of the company’s business lines was shipping goods from Europe to Russia. Supposedly, the firm was helping people buy expensive items at a reasonable price by exploiting a loophole in Russian law. “If you import goods, they get hit with high customs duties, but if it’s a parcel from a private individual, there are no duties at all,” the manager of the large Russian company explained to Dmitriy in a message. Soon Dmitriy received an employment contract in German and Russian, along with a copy of the passport of the Moscow company’s director. Pay was to be by the piece — 20 euros for every shipment to Russia. Christmas 2015 was approaching. And everything was falling into place so nicely…
Dmitriy’s job consisted of receiving parcels of goods at his address from various shops — mostly expensive electronics: mobile phones, tablets, luxury-brand electric razors. He was supposed to remove the item from its postal and factory packaging, photograph it, repack everything into a new, larger box, and take it to the post office. Dmitriy received the postage receipt from his manager online. The Moscow contacts asked him to throw away the receipts for the paid goods as unnecessary. The work picked up pace. Dmitriy’s sweet manager praised him regularly, writing that he would soon be among the company’s best employees and could count on a promotion in the future. By the end of the month, he was earning 500–600 euros — meaning that Dmitriy was carrying one large parcel to the post office almost every day.
Two months into the job, Dmitriy had to leave Berlin for a couple of weeks. So as not to let his employer down, he got a fellow student to fill in for him at the “Moscow company.” Dmitriy kept receiving praise almost every week until March 2016, when he received a summons to the police, and his bank account turned out to be frozen. Dmitriy immediately wrote to his manager: something’s wrong, what should I do? The reply, under the photo of the young beauty, asked him to calm down and forget about the trouble — the company’s legal department would clear the clouds over the head of their best employee at the large Moscow firm. That was the last contact he ever had with his presumed “Moscow” associates. Instead of legal protection, Dmitriy found himself facing a criminal case for “fraud.” His fellow student ended up under investigation as well. On top of a possible prison term of up to five years under §263 of the German Criminal Code, Dmitriy faced expulsion from university and the loss of his residence permit. Not wanting to go to prison, and unwilling to return to his home country, Dmitriy came to our law firm for help.
Our lawyers have long understood why Russian-speaking people so often fall victim to scammers: language difficulties, trust in verbal information, and the eternal “it will probably be fine.”
How to translate that particular brand of blind optimism into other languages is anyone’s guess — perhaps best illustrated as: blindfolding yourself and stepping off a roof, hoping to land in a fairy-tale kingdom rather than the morgue. In psychiatry, this is sometimes called affective psychosis — when optimism goes into overdrive. Infatuated with his “manager,” Dmitriy’s optimism went so far into overdrive that he paid no attention whatsoever to the fact that every receipt accompanying the parcels listed his own name as the buyer. “It doesn’t matter, they paid for everything anyway,” the student reasoned. Except they hadn’t. The payments came from German bank accounts whose owners, upon noticing the large debits, reversed the transfers for the expensive purchases. The fraudsters from the “large Moscow company” had gained access to these German account-holders’ accounts unlawfully. And on every single receipt, the buyer of record was Dmitriy — and, occasionally, his friend.
After talking with Dmitriy, it became clear that he was not guilty and had himself become the victim of fraud. Our lawyers took on the case. Documents obtained from the police showed that Dmitriy’s conduct had been misclassified as “fraud.” After we presented our arguments, the police reclassified the case under §261(5) — “negligent money laundering” (German: leichtfertige Geldwäsche) — carrying a maximum sentence of two years. There was still a fight ahead to get the case against our client discontinued entirely. Where fraud requires intent to commit a fraudulent act, “negligent money laundering” only requires that there were indications pointing to a possible criminal nature of the conduct that were carelessly disregarded as immaterial.
Our lawyers had to prove to the public prosecutor’s office not only that our client was not a fraudster, but that applying §261 to him was equally inappropriate. Our arguments centered on the fact that he had never committed any offense before. By March 2016, he already had an employment contract with a Berlin company and had started working there — evidence that his real interest lay in legitimate employment, not in criminal gain. As for the circumstances of the case, Dmitriy had an employment contract, was regularly reviewed, was paid reliably for his work, and received recognition in the form of various internal company titles. The only thing that might have tipped him off that something was wrong was his own name appearing on the purchase receipts — but he was convinced the goods had been paid for, and whose name was printed on the receipt seemed irrelevant to him.
It was only in the autumn of 2017 that we succeeded in getting the criminal case against Dmitriy discontinued. He is continuing his studies at university, and his residence permit has been extended. What may have pleased Dmitriy even more is that, following our letters, the retail chains dropped their claims against our client. He had been convinced he would spend the rest of his life working off debts that had been racked up in his name without his knowledge. It is fortunate that our lawyers’ experience helped Dmitriy come out of the situation with minimal losses — and a good deal wiser. But things could have gone very differently.
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