The NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has been characterized by unconventional attacks just as much as conventional ones, though the West has largely focused only on the speculative means through which Russia is allegedly waging what the Mainstream Media popularly refers to as hybrid warfare. Nevertheless, some reports have still trickled through indicating that Kiev and its Western patrons have weaponized Ukrainian phone scammers to orchestrate terrorist attacks inside of Russia.
These fraudsters have been active for years and used to simply swindle their victims at home, in Russia, and elsewhere across Europe through various phone schemes that mostly target the elderly. They tremendously ramped up their attacks across the continent since the start of Russia’s special operation and provoked such opprobrium from Ukraine’s Western partners that Kiev was forced to crack down. The UK-based Infosecurity Magazine reported on at least two of these incidents in November and March.
The first concerned “a major online fraud gang responsible for an estimated $200m in losses” all across Europe while the second was comparatively less significant since it “disrupted a prolific phishing gang it claims made 160 million hryvnias ($4.3m) from victims across Europe.” Meanwhile, US-based BankInfoSecurity reported in June that Kiev cracked down on “fake investment scams that involved stealing cryptocurrency and payment card details from European and Central Asian citizens.”
All three cases and others beyond the scope of this piece confirm that Ukraine hosts phone scammers that are active across the continent and who’ve continued fleecing average folks from their country’s Western partners despite the over $160 billion worth of aid that their governments have given Kiev. These crackdowns didn’t end this scourge, however, but resulted in the SBU taking control of those operations and weaponizing them to orchestrate terrorist attacks inside of Russia.
The Daily Beast reported on the Russian Interior Ministry’s report in early August about the way in which this is nowadays most frequently occurring. The scammers have taken to impersonating local security officials in order to manipulate their mostly elderly targets into sharing financial information that then makes them susceptible to being blackmailed into carrying out these attacks. The specific narratives employed vary but most reportedly have this modus operandi in common.
The reason why this month-old report is newsworthy in the present is because of the precedent established by these same phone scammers targeting European citizens over the past 18 months. As the Western public begins souring on the increasingly likely prospect of indefinitely financing the proxy war, at least absent a black swan event such as Russia breaking through the front lines to decisively end the conflict, it can’t be ruled out that the SBU might order their proxies to once again target Europeans too.
This novel form of hybrid warfare could be used to orchestrate false flag terrorist attacks in Europe that would then be blamed on Russia in order to manipulate public opinion in Ukraine’s favor. Poland is a particularly attractive target from Kiev’s perspective considering those two’s escalating disputes over the past month that were detailed here. The SBU could therefore kill two birds with one stone by punishing Poland in parallel with manipulating it into keeping the aid flowing despite their latest problems.
It should also be mentioned that members of the “Foreign Legion” could play a role as well by lending their native language skills to this operation in exchange for being redeployed to a cozy SBU-controlled call center as opposed to risking their lives storming Russian minefields under fire without air support. These proven terrorist methods and the logical motivation for targeting Europeans mean that any related reports of “Russian hybrid warfare plots” are likely false flags orchestrated by the SBU.
