Spanish
Moscow.- Scammers swindled a retiree and obtained $31,000 (almost 26,500 euros) through the new Russian national messaging program, Max, an application that the Kremlin is trying to promote while restricting Whatsapp and Telegram.
According to the independent platform Mediazona, which reported this Sunday, the scammers posed as employees of the Rosfinmonitoring fiscal agency and the Federal Security Service to subsequently meet their 70-year-old victim in St. Petersburg.
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Subsequently, they persuaded the woman to install the Max application, through which they continued to maintain contact until they stole almost 2.5 million rubles ($31,000), according to local media. Russian authorities are trying to promote the new application, developed this year by the Russian technology company VK, to extend its use among the population. In parallel, services have begun to be restricted in other more popular and widely used applications, such as Telegram and Whatsapp, which since last week have seen their calling services disabled. According to some Russian public servants, the intention of the block is to combat the growing number of scams in the country, something they claim Max can prevent. This Sunday, the independent platform Meduza reported that a deputy from Pskov, Artur Gaiduk - belonging to the Yabloko party, one of the few remnants of liberal opposition in the country - filed a complaint with the Federal Antimonopoly Service to verify the legality of blocking calls from Western applications. According to Gaiduk, the ban on calls in certain applications goes against the free choice of citizens for their communication services, which creates illegal competitive advantages for mobile operators and for Max services. On the other hand, Russian security services repeatedly warned that Ukrainian intelligence services communicate with Russian citizens via Telegram and Whatsapp chats to recruit them and carry out sabotage tasks in exchange for financial compensation. Max won a competition to become the national messaging service, which would integrate other uses linked to the Russian administrative and social security system, among many other uses, such as even serving as an identity document.
