Someone tried to force a teenager from Nizhny Novgorod to set fire to the military enlistment office.

      22 August 2025 16:34

      [265]

      Incidents

      In the Nizhny Novgorod Region a 14-year-old teenager reported to the police an attempt to involve him in a crime. Scammers threatened the minor and demanded that he set fire to the building of the local military enlistment office, using a cover story about fighting state traitors.

      According to the regional department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in early August a schoolboy from Shatkovsky District received a message in a messenger asking him to send a code, allegedly to create an electronic medical record. After the teenager sent the code, he received a phone call from a woman who introduced herself as an employee of the public services portal.

      The caller said that a loan had been taken out in the boy’s mother’s name and that the money had been transferred to accounts in an unfriendly country. Under the pretext of preventing criminal prosecution of the whole family, she connected the teenager with another person who introduced himself as an employee of Rosfinmonitoring.

      He demanded that the boy follow instructions and not tell anyone about what was happening. For several days the schoolboy received threatening messages and was forced to send video recordings proving that he was all right and that no suspicious calls were being received. After that he was told that there was a Ukrainian in the local military enlistment office. And to detain him the teenager was told to photograph the building, pour gasoline on the entrance and set it on fire.

      Despite the pressure, the eighth-grader refused to break the law and went to the police. The investigation showed that there had been neither loans nor a hack of the personal account on the public services portal, and the story turned out to be a carefully planned scam.

      Law enforcement warns: actions aimed at destabilizing the work of government bodies, including arson, are subject to criminal liability under Article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Depending on the consequences, the punishment can reach life imprisonment.

      The Nizhny Novgorod Region police urge residents to be vigilant. It is especially important to speak with children and elderly relatives, who most often become victims of such schemes. Genuine law enforcement officers do not call citizens with offers to participate in operations or with messages about transfers of funds to other countries.

      Earlier it was reported that two Nizhny Novgorod residents were detained for setting fire to a telecom operator’s base station.

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