Kyiv law enforcement officers have charged a 41-year-old Kyiv woman with fraud. According to investigators, she gained the trust of a military officer and swindled him out of 700,000 hryvnias.
This was reported to the Kyiv police and the city prosecutor's office on May 13.
It is about the events of the summer of 2024. As the prosecutor's office said, then the woman created a fake Facebook account under a fictitious name and someone else's photo of a young girl. That's how she met a 31-year-old military man from the Zhytomyr region. Over time, the correspondence turned into telephone communication and conversations about love.
At first, the woman pretended to care for the soldier. As the Kyiv police said, the man was defending the country on the Donetsk front, where he was seriously wounded.
And later she began to say that she was seriously ill, in the last stage of cancer, and needed urgent treatment and surgery in Germany, otherwise she might die.
“Using emotional pressure and manipulation, she convinced the victim to systematically transfer funds to her bank accounts,” the Kyiv police said in a statement.
Over four months of correspondence, the man gave the pseudo-patient more than 710 thousand hryvnias.
“His relatives, who had doubts about the reality of the love story, stopped these meetings. He also began to analyze the stories and find contradictions. Later, the military man found the real profile of the girl on social networks, whose photos the fraudster passed off as her own and sent to him,” the prosecutor's office informed.
Cyber police tracked the movement of money and determined that it was deposited into the woman's personal cards, as well as into her mother's account. Later, it was converted into cash through ATMs and cash desks of banking institutions.
The woman spent all the money on personal needs, the police press service said.
Law enforcement officers also said that during the search of the suspect, in particular, they discovered more than ten fake social media accounts that could be used for similar fraudulent activities.
The woman was charged with fraud committed on a particularly large scale or under martial law (Part 4, Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). She faces up to eight years in prison.