Illegal access: the widow of a contractor from Buryatia who died on the SVO is written from his stolen account

The deceased participant of the special military operation Alexei Vetoshnikov from Buryatia stole accounts in social networks, the attackers write to the widow of the contractor on his behalf. The police opened a criminal case under Part 1 of Art. 272 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("Illegal access to computer information"), a source in local law enforcement agencies told RT.

According to the interlocutor of RT, after the death of the soldier, information appeared that messages in support of Ukraine began to be published on Vetoshnikov's page on the social network VKontakte. Alexei's widow received letters condemning the SVO , also from the account of her late husband. According to the preliminary version of the investigation, the phone of the Russian serviceman remained in the SVO zone and there fell into the hands of intruders.

Alexey Vetoshnikov's page has been temporarily blocked several times, but so far offenders have managed to regain access to it. The investigation was launched by the police of the Kyakhta district - the deceased contractor came from there. By court decision or on the basis of an appeal from the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the prosecutor's office, Roskomnadzor has the right to block Vetoshnikov's account seized by intruders.

Hero from Kyakhta

Alexey Vetoshnikov went to the front line in the first days of a special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. At home, his wife was left waiting for him.

According to regional news portals, before the SVO, Alexei served for many years under contract - he decided to build a military career after completing military service in 2016. Then the young man signed a contract and went to Vladivostok, where he served in the 155th Separate Guards Marine Brigade of the Pacific Fleet.

From 2016 to 2017, Alexey Vetoshnikov participated in hostilities in Syria. For his success in the framework of the military operation in the SAR, he was awarded the medal of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and the gratitude of the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Syrian Armed Forces. Since September 2017, Alexey has the status of a combat veteran.

A month after the start of a special military operation in Ukraine, in March 2022, Vetoshnikov went missing, and in June he was declared dead. The man was posthumously presented with the Order of Courage. He was buried in his native Kyakhta in Buryatia on June 16.

Not the first case

The city of Kyakhta in the Republic of Buryatia is not the first time that it gets into the news reports. In August 2022, RT reported on several cases when the mothers of contract soldiers killed at the SVO were contacted by fraudsters, convincing them to transfer payments for their sons.

One of the victims eventually lost 7 million rubles received as compensation from the state. A criminal case was opened on this fact under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, but experts with whom RT communicated stated that it was almost impossible to return money in such cases.

Local social activists told RT about another similar episode - the attackers called the director of one of the Kyakhta schools and persuaded her to give them the data of the accounts on which there were combat payments for her son and compensation from the state. The woman did not succumb to the persuasion of scammers and told about suspicious calls to local volunteer organizations. After that, the offenders abruptly changed the tone of the conversation, lashing out at the woman with criticism of the SVO and Russian servicemen.

The situation with contract soldier Alexei Vetoshnikov in Buryatia is also not the first case when attackers in Ukraine use the phones of dead Russian servicemen to publish anti-Russian content on their behalf in social networks or persecute their relatives.

Earlier, RT wrote about Lieutenant Colonel Denis Kudrin from the Perm Territory - on his behalf, the attackers maintained a fake page in VKontakte since 2014-2015. With the help of the account, fraudsters extorted money from relatives of LPR servicemen who went missing or were captured by the Ukrainian side.

For several years, Denis Kudrin and his wife sought to block the fake account, but the attempts were unsuccessful. After Kudrin's death on March 7, 2022, the fake account continued to publish calls to transfer money to fraudsters for "information about the dead and captured participants of the SVO."