That wasn’t a colonel. But this corrupt chucklehead is.
Only seven engines? What did they arrest him for, not being corrupt enough?
Paywalled. Does it say anything more than he stole seven engines on the black market? Like who he sold them to, how much he got, or other details?
Wow, wasn’t for me, sorry.
MSN work better?
Just “the black market”.
Nope.
It appears the info comes from a press announcement from the relevant military prosecutor’s office, so I would be surprised if the gory details were floated.
It’d be hilarious if it turned out the black market buyers for all this Russian military stuff were secretly working for Ukraine.
Thank you.
The Ukrainians don’t need to buy the engines on the black market. They can just wait for the Russian tankers to deliver them.
Well, that’s weird. I pasted in an MSN link and the infobox shows the original Telegraph link. F’ing Discourse.
Trying it again, just in case.
Now, this is nothing new. Logistics corruption has been a thorn in the Russians’ side since the outset. The fact that it’s still ongoing is a little surprising. It’s harder to get away with theft if what you’re stealing is in high demand and under scrutiny.
And who buys hot tank engines?
I was a bit weirded out by that, but the link did work as you expected it to.
Of if they where working for the Russian military and buying them back and installing them.
Probably not Discourse, as the link takes you to the MSN URL - seems like it must be how MSN is providing a preview (and, as an aggregator, it is nice that the preview shows the actual source instead of taking credit themselves).
Ukraine: Fighting Russian Fire with More Fire.
Okay, no real evidence that the scammers are Ukrainian, but I’d be shocked if they weren’t. It’s nice to see someone weaponizing the kind of scams Russia has been pulling to hurt Russia, though.
It looks like it might be a real false-flag operation.
We need a new category: scam flag attack. Given how many people world-wide fall for stupidly obvious scams like this one, I have no doubt that a few dozen elderly Russians could, and probably did fall for this. Sure, maybe a few were really anti-war, and the Russian officials are trying to spin it as, “Oh, they just fell for a scam” rather than admit the war is unpopular, but I’m sure there are some who really did fall for a scam.
And this is a totally new way of waging war. If even a few of these are what they are claimed to be, then every babushka walking towards a recruiting station or police station has the potential to be a threat. That’s going to have at least some impact on the effectiveness of the recruiters and police.
Before reading the article, I was kind of impressed with the hackers not doing the usual “buy 10,000 rubles’ worth of Apple cards and send me the numbers” thing, turning their nefarious social engineering skills to good and not evil.
But then I read
The caller persuaded her to send them large sums of cash, then told her to carry out the arson attempt as part of her mission, the outlet wrote.
and I was less impressed.
It helps if you assume they’re donating 10% of the take to Ukraine.
But really, you need to figure out how stupid the person is before you try to talk them into firebombing a recruiting office, and money scams are an efficient (and profitable!) way of doing that.
If they fall for the scam, they are dumb enough to be talked into something else?
Yeah, pretty much. It’s a well-known phenomenon that someone who falls for one scam will likely fall for a follow-up scam.
“I gave him money, it stands to reason that he’s trustworthy.” = )
It’s called throwing good money after bad. Or in this case, throwing Molotov cocktails.
At least 25 killed in Russian air raids on Ukraine cities
Russia going after civilians yet again. 