Penza, 12 February 2016. PenzaNews. Identifying and locating phone scammers currently takes a very long time due to the sheer number of requests to various structures and state bodies the police are required to make during the investigation, announced Yuri Ruzlyaev, head of the Penza region Ministry of the Interior department, in his 2015 report during the 33rd regular session of the regional Legislative Assembly on Friday, February 12.

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“The difficulty with investigating such crimes is related to the fact that usually those scammers and orchestrators come from outside the Penza region. According to the current practice and some of the current criminal cases, the criminals came from the Kemerovo region, from the Krasnoyarsk Krai, the Samara region, the Perm region, the Arkhangelsk region. In order to reach this person, this criminal, we need to make too many requests that we are unable to expedite,” he said.

Just identifying the owner of a SIM card takes about 6-9 months, Yuri Ruzlyaev explained.

Discussint the topic further, he gave an example of actions conducted when a scamming phone call comes from inside a penal institution.

“Next, we begin the next stage – begin the investigation together with the Federal Penitentiary Service to locate it. We install locators to detect it during the next signal, and then conduct the analysis, compare the number of calls conducted to different regions and see whether these constituted a fraud or were simply calls. After all, sometimes it goes like that: they just call, but the receiver does not fall for it and did not speak to them [the fraudster], while another call does the thing – people go running and transferring the money. And it takes a whole year in order to detect this chain and confirm the fraudulent intent,” Yuri Ruzlyaev pointed out.

The tried and tested practices by the police allows to improve some of the procedures, the head of the regional Ministry of the Interior department added.

“If we review them and they get approved, this will expedite the process of establishing the truth and achieving the results, so that people would be held criminally liable in due time,” he stressed.