A spate of deaths connected to phone scams have been reported in Russia. The law is struggling to keep up.
The phone call came while Nina Vershinina’s daughter was away in Moscow.
The person on the line told Nina – a retired doctor in the Urals city of Orenburg who was almost completely blind – that her adult daughter Yulia had injured a child in a car accident. A criminal case had been launched, but if Nina paid a fee, the problem would go away.
The scammers kept the pensioner talking until a courier arrived at her flat to collect 150,000 rubles (US$1,800) in cash.
It was only then that she was able to speak to Yulia on the phone and the pair realised what had happened. They called the police, who used CCTV from outside the apartment building to identify the courier and arrest him.
Then Nina began to feel unwell. She was taken to hospital and her daughter flew back from Moscow to see her – but just as Yulia arrived in Orenburg, she was told that her mother had died.
This is the first case in journalist Ivan Kozlov’s feature for the Russian-language outlet Reporter Stories. His article explores the phenomenon of people who died by suicide or from the effects of severe stress after falling victim to phone scammers.
The courier in Nina’s case, who was 22 years old, turned out to have worked on many other scams, in which he handled a total of 7 million rubles (US$83,000). His parents returned the cash he took from Nina and he was sentenced to three years in prison.
But the people who actually made the call were never found. Police told Yulia they had used spoof numbers and therefore could not be traced.
Kozlov cites dozens more such cases. One victim, a 78-year-old Moscow State University professor, handed over nearly 53 million rubles (US$631,000), including money from selling two flats. Months later, after the fraud was uncovered, he died by suicide.
While not all the victims of such fraud are elderly, the majority of scammers do appear to target pensioners.
But it’s not always about the money.
According to Kozlov, Ukrainian scammers have repeatedly used such schemes since the start of the full-scale invasion, persuading people to carry out attacks on Russian targets.
In 2023, 76-year-old Valery Yershov apparently became an example of this. His case was connected to a wave of telephone scams targeting Russians and pushing them into attacks on military recruitment offices.
Yershov was told to throw two Molotov cocktails at his local registration and enlistment office. They missed but he was arrested and charged with attempted destruction of property. It was only after his arrest that the scale of the scam he was caught up in became clear – fraudsters had already forced him to sell his flat.
A widower with few close relationships, Yershow had nobody to discuss the crime with. Police sent him home after briefly detaining him. The next day, he also died by suicide in the apartment that no longer belonged to him.
Lawyer Alexandra Baeva tells the journalist that pensioners are particularly vulnerable to such schemes. Investigations are often slow and the people behind the fraud rarely make it to court.
Even when they are caught, prosecutors would have to establish a clear causal link between the scammers’ actions and a subsequent death or suicide. Baeva says she knows of no case where someone convicted of telephone fraud has also been punished for the death of their victim.
For Nina’s daughter, that feels like an obvious failure. “The main evil,” she says, was not the young courier who collected the money, but the people “who called and talked to her”.
The original article, ‘Звонок: Как российские пенсионеры гибнут из-за телефонных мошенников и почему за это никто не отвечает’, was first published in Russian by Ivan Kozlov for Reporter Stories on August 11, 2026.
Summary by contributing editor Theo Merz.
Theo’s take: While scam calls are far from a uniquely Russian problem, the Reporter Stories article explores some added risks in the country. In the case of Nina Vershinina, scammers were able to exploit perceptions of corruption: it was conceivable that an official could call her at home and demand money for a criminal case to be resolved. In the case of Valery Yershov, the invasion of Ukraine appeared to be a factor. It’s also notable that the people most often targeted in these scams are pensioners, a group that typically supports Russia’s current leadership. But here officials are unwilling or unable to help them. It’s an interesting insight into another underexplored impact of the ongoing war, that English readers might not otherwise be aware of.