No phone, but the credit remains!

38 trusting citizens fell victim to fraudsters from Orsha. In March of the current year, the court of the Orsha district and the city of Orsha passed a sentence against three young men who persuaded strangers to take out expensive phones on installment plans, assuring them that they would not have to pay themselves. For the service rendered, they paid a reward insignificant compared to the cost of the gadget or simply promised to buy alcohol. In one of the cases, the attackers posed as police officers and asked to take out an installment plan for a phone that they needed for work. In several cases, the victims were intoxicated, which made it easier to persuade them to enter into loan agreements.

At the same time, they cited the impossibility of taking out loans and installment plans for themselves due to existing debt obligations, insignificant income, foreign citizenship, and other reasons.

In order to confirm their intentions to repay the loans, the criminals offered to write corresponding receipts, and in some cases, they made the first payment themselves, after which the citizens who fell for the bait bore the burden of repaying the obligations to the banks.

Having fallen into debt, the victims hurried to seek help from the police.

As a result of their criminal activity, over seven months, the young men acquired phones and other goods purchased by the victims who trusted them, for a total amount of almost 139 thousand rubles.

For committing fraud by a group of persons, repeatedly, on a particularly large scale, two of the attackers were sentenced to imprisonment for a term of 5 years and 6 months and 6 years and 6 months, with serving their sentences in a correctional colony under an enhanced regime; each was also fined 3700 rubles.

Their accomplice, who had not previously been prosecuted for theft, was convicted of fraudulent actions committed by a group of persons on a large scale – to 3 years of restriction of liberty without being sent to an open-type correctional institution, with a fine of 1850 rubles.

In June 2023, in

The Vitebsk Regional Court held an appellate review of the criminal case. The higher instance agreed with the court's conclusions on the guilt of Orsha residents in misappropriating property by deception and with the decision on the punishment imposed on the guilty parties.

     

O.Ya. Verzhbovich, Senior Prosecutor of the Department for Supervision of Legality of Court Decisions in Criminal Cases of the Vitebsk Regional Prosecutor's Office