Blocking the site as a means of combating fraudsters

This post is based on real events that can happen to everyone. The other day, a friend of mine told the following story: his birthday was nearing, and he decided to tell his wife what he would like to receive as a gift about this. His choice fell on a semi-professional radio receiver of a particular model. On specialized sites, he found the addresses of several stores, including a certain site technoplus.ru, where it was stated that the goods are in stock, and the price, although it differs in the smaller direction from other stores, is quite comparable with them (the difference is maybe 200-300 rubles). In general, he threw off the description of this receiver to his wife and received from her in an hour the message “the order is accepted, not subject to change” (yes, she ordered the receiver for technoplus.ru). Who would know ... It was on Thursday, and on Saturday the wife said that it looks like this site is a scam, and I don’t see a gift (like money) ... How this story developed further, what to do in such a situation and most importantly, how not to get into it - under the cut.


The situation has not yet been resolved (and there is no hope for a quick solution to this problem) , so for now I’ll just describe the experience gained by my acquaintances (of course, with his permission and on the basis of the materials he kindly provided, that is, correspondence).

So, the chronology of events is as follows.
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On the 16th day, an order is made on the technoplus website : the goods are added to the basket, paid for without any suspicion (payment takes place on the Yandex website, and the money goes to the account of a private person, but when six screens are replaced, the text is not read so intently, yes and then ... I remember, here they already wrote about the problems of small business with getting money through integrators ... if they hadn’t gotten enough hysteria on this topic, perhaps my friend would have been able to withdraw the payment, think about it a little earlier).
On the 16th and 17th of the day, the spouses of my acquaintance received calls on the phone , but they “failed”, and it turned out to be impossible to call back the number that was determined. Wife decided that this store was trying to contact her. Well, technical failures are possible.
On the 18th (Saturday) it turned out that the Technoplus.ru store was a scammer , but it was not possible to check these reviews for their veracity. My friend decided to wait for Monday and call the seller on the phone number listed on the site.
20th (Monday) Expected - answered the answering machine. In Skype, the "seller" was also absent. Immediately (at 12 o'clock) was followed by an appeal to the SGB-Bank (which issued the card with which funds were debited) and to Yandex-money (by the way, the federal number for 8-800 indicated on their website turned out to be non-working! I had to write letters ... true, the answer came within half an hour). In the SGB-Bank they offered to write a statement, in Yandex-money they demanded an extract from the bank:

If you paid from a bank card, please tell us the first 6 and last 4 digits of its number, and also send us a screenshot from the history of your Internet banking operations (for example, Sberbank Online), where this payment will be displayed with details of the payee or an extract from your bank, where details will also be visible.

That is, in fact, Yandex.Money could say something like “if you doubt the counterparty, try to find out in your bank whether the payment has passed, and if not, cancel it,” but they said “send payment confirmation”, there is first pay!


The bank said that the money for payment is reserved in the system, but did not leave ! Rare luck? - Nothing like this! Already on Monday evening, the SGB Bank, in fact having a statement on the withdrawal of a payment, is holding it! (Yes, with a delay of 4 days!) And gives an extract about it.

Then ... once an extract from the bank about performing the operation appeared - there is nothing left to do, how to continue correspondence with Yandex-money employees ... Here is their answer:

The payment made by you and credited to the account 410012369283193 is spent on purchasing goods and services at Yandex.Money. We conducted an investigation and took the necessary measures, however, unfortunately, we were unable to return your payment.

In order to try to get your money back and the attackers to bear the well-deserved punishment, you should contact the law enforcement agencies with a statement about the commission of illegal actions against you.

For this you need:

1. Contact the law enforcement agency at your place of residence (if you are in Russia, you can find the nearest ATS by reference
mvd.ru/contacts/sites ).
2. Do not forget to take with you identification documents (passport).
3. Write a statement to the law enforcement agency (this can be done in advance).
4. Get a certificate of registration of your application.
5. To recommend to the person who accepted the application from you, to address issues related to your application, to units that investigate crimes in the field of high information technologies.

In the application, you need to specify as accurately as possible all the information you have: the wallet number, your contact details, and detailed information about the payment. If possible, attach proof of crediting to your account (prepaid cards, receipts
payment terminals and banks, etc.)

All information we have regarding the incident, we will provide law enforcement agencies upon request.

Our safety recommendations are available on the money.yandex.ru/security page .

Thank you for your request.

“Thanks for the request”? - Yes, always please!

This was followed by a dreary procedure for filing an application to the police. If someone wants to experience it for themselves - be aware, this procedure will take 4 hours (four!) Of your time. One thing is good - investigators and investigators with whom you will be dealing, work around the clock, so you don’t need to ask for leave from work or wait “until tomorrow” - though you won’t get enough sleep ... But what can't you do to restore justice?

The investigator told my acquaintance that such situations are not uncommon, they often find criminals (it pleases, but not much, because ...) ... but even if they are found, they usually don’t recover the amounts received by them fraudulently possible, since these criminals themselves have already been convicted many times , there is nothing to take from them, etc. etc. But - they filed a criminal case, they added a correspondence with Yandex and the bank, they promised to inform about the progress of the investigation.

Now the question arises: why did the bank, where the victims turned, without actually transferring the money to the attackers, did not cancel the payment? And why Yandex money, being warned that, most likely, the payment is made in favor of the attackers, also executed it?

Let's deal with SGB-Bank (former Severgazbank). His “delayed reaction” to what is happening can be called ordinary sloppiness (in the era of the Internet and passing payments within 15 minutes it is surprising that the payment went from lunch Thursday to Monday evening). However, it "touches" something else: when the cardholder addresses the office on Monday and requests an extract from the operation, they cannot provide it, because the operation has not yet taken place, and when he immediately writes an application to cancel the operation, it is vice versa, they are executed ( ?) But on the other hand - and what do you want from girls-operators, who are paid 13 (thirteen) thousand salaries?

By Yandex-money is legally difficult to "get to the bottom". There are two options for interpreting the moment before reaching which the paying customer has the right to cancel (withdraw) the payment order given to them : 1) “until the moment of withdrawal of funds in pursuance of the client’s order from the bank account of the servicing bank” and 2) “until the moment of withdrawal of funds from the correspondent account of the third bank (that is, in this case, Yandex-money). "In practice, the first scheme works, although the more reasonable (and, by the way, legally quite acceptable!) is the second (but - alas - personal data protection and everything else). Just one tricky moment: in a criminal case, the accused is an unidentified person who committed extortion, but not a bank or Yandex money (yes, you are! The bank and the poison are white and fluffy!), but if you want to express your "fe" to the bank - go to their office and write a claim! Only it is unlikely that it will help you ... only your time will be wasted.

Hence the conclusion: if you find that instead of buying in a normal online store, you transferred the money to the scammers — run to your bank — find out the fate of the transfer and immediately cancel it!

So. The money is gone, it will be very difficult to return it well (in a nutshell, you can say goodbye to the money, no matter how offensive it is). But maybe there is some opportunity to protect others from such a scourge ? See :

Aleksey: April 10, 2014 -

I ordered a subscriber station from them. Paid and neither the money nor the station ... At first they answered the e-mails that the suppliers failed, they sent the defective ones. Then they just stopped responding. They can get a call from a new phone only once, they promise to figure it out with a problem, then you will not get through from this phone.

Andrey: April 17, 2014 -

Similar situation. I ordered the goods, paid from the card through the site, and since then, for 1.5 months the seller has ignored me, the answering machine is activated for calls, messages are ignored. The site continues to work, new orders are accepted. The provider otbutbolil to the police, I hope they will help, now a unit has been created there to combat Internet fraudsters.

Igor: April 22, 2016 -

I, too, drove the order there, and the same thing had been a full zero for half a year already. We write this, but we still need to do something!

Contacting the police with the maximum that will give is the hope of catching fraudsters (this is if they didn’t guess to use other passport details in the domain registration and payments, plus if they don’t cash out your money, buying real goods for virtual addresses like the post office at such and such address, the cell is so-and-so — although the operational-search measures in this situation are also hypothetically possible, but they require a very quick interaction of the police, the payment system, the online store selling the goods, and the delivery service and - not too many links there), but the site and will continue its work - the police administrative affairs such as the closure of sites is not engaged (just like in the joke: "I am the genie of narrow specialization - 100, 200, a pint"). In this situation, you can only advise one thing - having received the case number (usually it happens several days after the first call to the police), write a statement to the prosecutor’s office demanding the separation of the domain on the basis that it is used for a long time to commit unidentified persons with criminal acts. Attach to the application the entire set of materials submitted to the police, plus the date and number of the criminal case filed against the fraudsters. And then ... it is completely unknown how long such a domain will be divided ... the prosecutor's office will conduct its own checks, and how long it will take for it to do so is difficult to say, what the results will be - is also unknown ...

What other measures can be taken by the victim to take prompt action aimed at stopping the operation of such a site? Offhand, you can only suggest to order a DDOS attack, so that the site owner “got the money” from the provider or even “flew out” from the Internet (consider legitimate ways of fighting!) To write to Google and Yandex (for prompt “throwing out” the site from the search results), But what's the point if they come to this site by clicking on banners? As a rule, it is profitable for owners of fraudulent sites to show such banners not permanently, but one-time and on certain days. Again, even if you suddenly find the banner of such a site - to whom and what claims can you present? .. Here is additional information on this topic:

ROCIT will close “fraudulent” online stores without trial

Domains “for life” sites blocked in the Russian Federation no one can register again

In the light of the presented situation, these two measures seem to be quite reasonable: first, creating fraudulent online stores will become more expensive if the life of each such store tends to zero (domain technoplus.ru, for example, was registered in 2006, although I personally I do not exclude that once it was really a store that honestly delivered the ordered goods to customers, but this is not the first year that this “store” has been engaged in fraud with impunity ); secondly, the promotion of the domains of such “stores” could potentially become unprofitable (only the attacker spins the site up, as it is closed, and the domain is on the “black list.” On the other hand, of course, these measures have a downside: “ distribution "can get a regular entrepreneur. But, let me, can you give examples when buyers opened a criminal case under the article" fraud "against an online store that fulfills its obligations? Again, a similar situation (initiation of a criminal case and The site blocking that is blowing), in my opinion, is basically impossible if the store remains in touch with the customer, communicates with it (or phone calls - it’s enough to present an extract from the telephone operator about incoming and outgoing calls, in which case the phone number will be present). of the buyer) and confirms its obligations to deliver the ordered goods. Close the fraudulent website promptly - this is really important, and the working scheme of such a closure “in the pretrial order” (that is, during the investigation to the initiated criminal case ), and not “without trial” is quite adequate.

For myself, my friend, who lost a certain amount of money (quite a lot, of course, but not fatally) concluded: never buy the Internet again before buying something on the Internet, along and across to explore the seller - TIN, OGRN (yes, and see if I’m out of account!), negative reviews (they should be, but “not scary”!). Less to believe banner advertising, but better - turn it off at all (except for her, you will not see this site anywhere else, and then you will not even know on which site you clicked on the banner). Well, my friend also decided to have no business with the poison. Maybe there are “spoons”, but “sediment remained”.

Well ... I hope this material will help someone from the readers to avoid the mistakes of others. All good, prosperity and ... honest sellers!

UPD:

Yes, blocking a website without trial is a bad thing. Therefore, the requirement to block must be submitted, having on hand a court decision in your favor (in a criminal case on fraud) . It is possible that the appeal to the prosecutor's office before the hearings on the criminal case in court will allow you to quickly close the scam site, however, you will find yourself outside the legal field - and the site owners will be able to file a recourse. So you need to wait for the verdict (because at this moment the site owners who stole your money will be recognized as fraudsters, but not before) .

Regarding the possibility of closing the site of an honest store "without trial". In criminal proceedings, the closure of the site is impossible (the closure of the site and the delimitation of the domain are issues resolved under civil law, not criminal law). Again, fraud is that someone (a fraudster) seeks to get money from someone without the desire to provide something in return (goods, services). If the online store comes in contact with the buyer and confirms the commitments made, and even more so - fulfills them (for example, provides a mail tracker or parcel identifier sent by the transport company to the buyer), then the criminal case should be terminated for lack of crime, and if at this stage the seller starts to delay delivery (referring to the lack of goods in the warehouse, its long delivery from the supplier, etc.), then this may be the reason for the administrative claim maximum (yes, you can suppose that in this way the seller may try to drag out time to infinity, using your money).

If the store has entered into an active correspondence with the buyer and is open for communication (“real people” are answered by phone, not autoresponders; the written appeals on the website or by e-mail receive answers, not formal replies), the store confirmed its obligations - we cannot talk about criminal prosecution, and therefore there is no reason to close the site.