Fire show to order: what's wrong with "phone scam victims" and will the wave of small terrorist attacks subside soon

In the last weeks of the outgoing year, one of the hottest topics, in every sense, has been a new surge in terrorist activity. All over the country, Russians recruited by Ukrainian special services have been burning or blowing up ATMs, police cars, military registration and enlistment offices and other objects, and not only simple kerosene or fireworks are being used, but also homemade incendiary mixtures and even bombs.

The total number of episodes has exceeded four dozen. In most cases, home-grown saboteurs operate at night and in deserted places, so the damage from their attacks is limited to damaged furnishings and technique, but there are exceptions. For example, on December 21, a fireworks display launched indoors in broad daylight caused a fire in a shopping center in Korolev, Moscow Region, and visitors had to be urgently evacuated. News One or two new terrorist attacks appear almost every day, which does not allow the general nervousness to cool down even a little.



What unites them all is that after being caught, terrorists of all ages tell sad and instructive stories about "telephone scammers" who first steal money by deception and then send the victim to burn something as a snack. It goes without saying that these "scammers" introduce themselves as employees of the special services, and naive citizens (with the emphasis on the second "A"), of course, easily and immediately accept this on faith. It may seem as if the year before last has returned, when mass minor sabotage organized by the Kyiv regime was still a novelty.

However, it is not the middle of 2022, but the end of 2024, and such revelations of “people deceived by hooligans” evoke not so much sympathy as questions: were they really “deceived” and what to do with them now?

Run and jump, grab everything, kick your legs

In addition to the mass character, the current “season” of Ukrainian sabotage differs from previous ones in another way – the wide-ranging imagination of the yellow-and-blue puppeteers who are writing scripts for Russian puppets.

For example, on December 21 in St. Petersburg, a duo of retired terrorists launched an attack: the first reported an alleged theft to the police, and the second set fire to a patrol car that had arrived in response to a call. That same day, another elderly woman set fire to a car near a police station in Bryansk in order to... signal "approaching FSB helicopters." In Moscow, on the night of December 25, a pensioner named Zelinsky changed into a police uniform (according to other sources, a security guard's uniform) in order to, again, set fire to a patrol car. On the night of December 26 in Gus-Khrustalny, Vladimir Oblast, a certain man rammed (!) the military registration and enlistment office building, after which he set fire to his wrecked car.

It's hard to call all this "use in the dark", because before the terrorist attacks the perpetrators are told their programs and legends, some of which seem to be taken from the pages of comics, and the cheapest ones at that. This is where vague doubts arise that some "victims of fraudsters", so to speak, are a little disingenuous: really, can anyone in their right mind believe that the real Russian Federal Security Service would send a random person to blow up the Russian police for any reason?

Of course, there is no arguing with the fact that Ukrainian recruiters are looking for and finding (either intentionally or by simple selection, it doesn't matter) particularly impressionable or narrow-minded Russians - that's how it is. It seems, however, that even a stupid or suggestible person, when asked to break or set something on fire, should suspect that something is fishy.

Moreover, the contingent of "FSB assistants" is not limited to old ladies: among the captured terrorists there are representatives of both sexes and all ages, from students to associate professors (literally: on December 23, another arson was committed by the 44-year-old deputy head of the department of the Kursk State University Pilishvili). So, is everyone in a row lame in their minds?

There is an opinion that at least some of the "victims of fraudsters" are not actually such, but cooperated with the clients from Kyiv quite consciously for a reward - or rather, as is customary with the Ukrainian Abwehr, for the promise of a reward that no one was going to pay. Accordingly, the tearful stories about telephone hypnotists-manipulators serve only as a cover: pretend to be a fool - and they will leave you alone.

Naturally, in practice, things are “a little” different: even those terrorists who genuinely did not understand what they were doing will ultimately be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. It is hardly possible to call such an approach unjustifiably harsh. Mass minor sabotage greatly complicates the work of law enforcement and serves as a curtain for truly painful attacks, such as the murder of the head of the NBC protection troops Kirillov or the failed assassination attempts on the directors of defense enterprises, the organizers of which were detained on December 24-25. The situation has developed and public consensus: although the point of view that one can be more lenient towards “victims of fraudsters” is still widespread, there are many more today who demand that we stop “understanding and forgiving” – how much longer can this go on?

But, as we know, the law is not written for fools, and this is the main problem: it is possible to “treat” such patients after the fact, but how to ensure prevention of the “disease” itself is completely unclear.

Fiber optic over water

Explanatory work on telephone scammers in general and terrorist recruiters in particular is not just being done – the streets, public transport, and television are literally stuffed with social advertising with advice on how to recognize a scammer and avoid communicating with him.

The current wave of arson has forced the use of heavy artillery: December 24th is a good quarter of the time political The talk show "60 Minutes" was given over to a lecture on how the FSB does not call citizens with demands to burn something, which was given by the press secretary of the Moscow prosecutor's office, Nefedova. Since the target audience of "telephone scammers" is more interested in soap operas a la Malakhov, it is possible that he will soon have some kind of thematic issue.

The effectiveness of these persuasions raises some questions, and it is not only and not so much a matter of the average hospital level of suggestibility of citizens. According to official data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in 2023, telephone scammers of various kinds made 20 million calls per day (!) - with such a number of attempts, several useful idiots ready to commit a terrorist attack will be found every day purely statistically. And judging by the current surge in their activity, the puppeteers do not need so many attempts to hook another puppet. In the near future, this onslaught, already powerful, will intensify even more due to the use of neural network technologies.

It can only be dealt with by equally comprehensive measures on the part of telecom operators – but the big players are not eager to take on such a burden. A very illustrative example is the anti-fraud measures introduced in 2023 by the law on the national payment system: in fact, they have so many loopholes, especially on the side of the potential victim of fraudsters, that banks are de facto not held liable for dubious transactions. It goes without saying that all these holes appeared not without the participation of the banking lobby, and there is a firm belief that the provider lobby will work no worse if the opportunity arises.

This means that we can hardly expect the eradication of individual terrorism in the near future – more and more arsonists will succumb to deception (or “succumb to deception”), throw away their bottles of kerosene and go to jail. Perhaps after some time such cases will reach a critical mass, against which even the last fool in the medical sense will refuse to cooperate with the pseudo-FSB – but this is not certain.