Robot's 'yes' leads to 300,000 ruble loss in bank fraud

A Yekaterinburg resident came face to face with fraudsters who steal money from accounts. Typically, victims of such criminals do not see their offenders face to face; they are scammed over the phone. The criminals, whom a Yekaterinburg man named Vasily unfortunately encountered, managed to combine «classic» theft techniques with modern ones. They stole the victim«s bank cards and then managed to withdraw money from them through an app.

Vasily showed admirable persistence: he spent two years in a legal battle with the bank and achieved having the court recognize him as a victim. How he managed this and what it cost him, read in the material by Roman Maryanenko.

Never Talk to Strangers

An unpleasant incident happened to Vasily on the night of October 6–7, 2023. He was returning home through Plotinka (a dam area in Yekaterinburg) and got into a conversation with strangers who somehow snatched his mobile phone and wallet. In the wallet were a credit and a debit card from Sberbank (Sber), as well as 5,000 rubles in cash (about $53 at current rates).

The Yekaterinburg man discovered the loss of his items only in the morning and immediately started calling Sberbank to block his cards. But it was too late: the perpetrators, using Vasily»s SIM card from the stolen phone, logged into the «Sberbank Online» app through password recovery. Then they transferred money from the credit card to the debit card and changed its PIN code. And then they withdrew all the money from the card through an ATM of a partner bank. The damage amounted to almost 300,000 rubles (approximately $3,200 at current rates).

Vasily had to go to court. He filed a lawsuit in which he demanded that the banking operations conducted by the fraudsters be declared invalid.

What«s most interesting is that the night money transfers seemed suspicious to Sberbank. There were all grounds for this: the amounts were large, the card»s PIN was changed, the app was accessed from another mobile device, and so on. As a result, the bank initially started blocking the largest transactions. This happened at least four times. But then Sberbank still allowed the funds to be withdrawn.

Later, the courts concluded that Sberbank did not exercise due diligence:

«In this case, the client«s identification was only by his phone number. At the same time, the bank could and should have used other means of client identification to verify the authority of the person on the other end of the line: ask for passport data, a code word, email address, and so on,» noted Vladimir Aleshin.

The Chelyabinsk Cassation Court put an end to this case on the second round of consideration. It released Vasily from repaying the debt on the credit card from which the money was stolen. The court decision also emphasized the very loophole that allowed the fraudsters to pocket others» money:

«Identification by requesting a «code word» was not provided for; it is the bank, offering the possibility of remote service provision, that is obliged to ensure the safety of providing the service remotely for the consumer. This was not achieved under the established circumstances of the case and led to negative consequences for the consumer in the form of loss of funds and the emergence of a financial obligation to the bank,» stated the cassation instance«s decision.

We contacted Sberbank regarding this matter, but they refrained from commenting. Unfortunately, the police were unable to track down the fraudsters who stole Vasily«s wallet and phone.

The bank has not yet recalculated the debt, although it has already received the writ of execution. Vasily still receives debt reminders via SMS and in the app. Sberbank reminds the victim that enforcement proceedings have been initiated against him.

We often write about how fraudsters deceive residents of the Sverdlovsk region. In 2025, there have been multiple cases where criminals took out loans in the names of Ural residents, using their old SIM cards that were not unlinked from accounts.

Earlier, we published a column by our regular expert Dmitry Larionov. He talked about how to successfully protect oneself from fraudsters who hunt for accounts on »Gosuslugi« (the Russian government services portal).

Read all news about fraudsters and their methods in the special section.