Residents of Buryatia are being deceived when making online purchases. The police received several similar complaints in one day.
So, the day before morning, a 30-year-old woman contacted the Ministry of Internal Affairs. She said that she ordered an electric stove on the website of a large electronics store. A little later, she received a message in the messenger that the ordered copy of the household appliance was defective and she needed to cancel the order and make a new one. The manager convinced the customer that the money for the first order would be returned to the card. She re-ordered and paid for the equipment, but the money was never returned.
Then, when the manager again asked to cancel and re-create and pay for the order, the woman realized that she was being deceived. She called the official hotline, where she was told that she had not made any orders through their network. The police found out that the woman made a purchase on a duplicate website, which differs by one symbol from the real one. And all this time, scammers communicated with her. The damage amounted to about 48 thousand rubles.
Also on April 23, the duty department received a statement from a 20-year-old student. He said that he gave 77 thousand rubles to the scammers. The young man found a group for making money on cryptocurrency in one of the instant messengers and left his phone number. The group’s manager contacted him and offered to buy digital currency. An account was created for the young man on a crypto platform, where he deposited 77 thousand rubles. Then the manager offered to contribute more funds, the young man refused, but the interlocutor insisted. Then the young man suspected that he had contacted scammers. He tried to withdraw funds, but was unable to.
On the same day, a 47-year-old Ulan-Ude resident contacted the police. The man reported that he found a publication on a popular classifieds website about the sale of a boat motor. The seller offered to continue communication in the messenger, and the potential buyer, despite warnings from the trading platform about possible risks, left his contact.
The seller convinced the man that his purchase was packaged for shipment and provided copies of documents to the transport company. The applicant transferred more than 126 thousand rubles to the seller’s account. A day later, he tried to enter the track number on the transport company’s website, but the data turned out to be invalid. Then the man called the TC hotline, where he found out that no one had sent such cargo in his name.
Buryatia police urge citizens to be careful when making online purchases. Fraudsters create copies of websites, choose a similar domain name, and post photos of goods and services copied from the real website.
