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- Engaged in correspondence: members of the gang of "black realtors" received up to 23 years
Engaged in correspondence: members of the gang of "black realtors" received up to 23 years
The Moscow City Court sentenced five defendants in the case of mass embezzlement of Moscow real estate to long prison terms ranging from 12 to 23 years. Among them are three former police officers who, according to investigators, helped criminals obtain information about empty or extinct apartments in the center of the capital. One defendant was given a suspended sentence, and another defendant was acquitted. Over the past eight years, the defendants have illegally taken over almost 60 apartments with a total value of hundreds of millions of rubles. People were also abducted: they were taken from Moscow to other regions and kept locked up there — some died during captivity. Details of the scam can be found in the Izvestia article.
How "black realtors" abducted people
The defendants in the case of large-scale fraud with metropolitan apartments received long prison terms ranging from 12 to 23 years. On June 3, the Moscow City Court announced such a verdict to six defendants. The seventh defendant, a former district police officer, was found not guilty by the court and released right in the courtroom.
According to investigators, in 2011, businessman Rafael Khamidullin formed a criminal community, whose members abducted people in Moscow and the Moscow region, forged their documents and took over apartments. The scheme of the crimes was as follows: from former police officers (all of whom also ended up in the dock), the attackers received information about unprivatized apartments or single property owners, acting head of the 2nd investigative Department of the 1st Directorate for the investigation of particularly important cases of the GSU IC of Russia in Moscow Artur Aghajanyan told Izvestia.
Criminals abducted some of the owners and took them from the capital to other regions of the country, while their apartments were privatized and sold.
According to Artur Aghajanyan, the former owners were kept locked up in inhumane conditions for several years.
"All the victims were elderly, so they couldn't escape or call someone," the investigator said. — Fraudsters deprived one woman of the right to housing and took her to another city, where she wandered for several years. We found her and returned her to Moscow, where she was able to meet her son.
Another elderly woman, a labor veteran, was abducted from the hospital and transported to another region of the country. They made another passport in the name of the victim, deprived her of the right to housing, discharged her from the apartment and registered her in another region.
"The woman was placed in a closed room and held there until she died," the investigator said.
In total, the bandits abducted four apartment owners in this way.
Scams with "dead souls"
In addition to bullying living people, the criminals also hunted the dead, the investigator said. They monitored reports of corpses found in apartments, entered these apartments, and stole the passports of the deceased and title documents.
Thanks to the complicity of the police, information about the dead did not get into the relevant databases and the apartment owners were not officially listed as dead anywhere. On their behalf, bandits privatized housing (if it was not owned), issued a deed of gift for it, inherited it or sold it on the real estate market to bona fide buyers.
So, the accomplices fraudulently acquired ownership of an apartment in a building on Marshal Zhukov St., the Prosecutor General's Office reported. The apartment was on social loan from a resident of the capital, who died in March 2015.
The gang also stole an apartment in a building on 1905 street, which at that time cost more than 8 million rubles. Its owner died in January 2015. Along with the apartment, the intruders also stole her bank deposit. Using fake passports, they stole money from the accounts of other deceased citizens.
The police helped the members of the OPS to obtain fictitious documents — the passports contained the personal data of the real owners, but the photos were pasted into them by others.
The criminals forged court decisions, submitted documents to the Federal Register and entered into the right of inheritance. At the same time, the fakes were made so competently that neither the courts, nor the notaries, nor the executive authorities ever suspected a trick.
According to such schemes, criminals made deals with dozens of apartments. The investigators opened 56 criminal cases, which were then combined into one proceeding.However, the current case includes only 24 apartments in Moscow, as well as one apartment and two land plots in the Moscow region for a total amount of more than 260 million rubles. The remaining episodes were excluded from the case due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.
What terms did the police get?
Investigators tracked down the attackers in 2019, when they tried to privatize a departmental apartment owned by the Ministry of Defense.
Depending on the role of each of the defendants, they were charged with organizing and participating in the OPS, kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, fraud and attempted fraud, and the legalization of criminally obtained funds and property.
The Moscow City Court completed the consideration of the criminal case and pronounced a verdict against: Khamidullin R.R., Dubrovsky G.A., Nikolaeva S.V., Tolkacha A.V., Deinichenko R.V., Velichko A.V., Barkov A.A.
During the search, dozens of boxes with forged documents were found in their possession — more than 60 passports of deceased citizens, seals of courts, notaries, notarial powers of attorney, birth and marriage certificates and other title documents. They were all fake.
In addition, one of the accomplices found a box with keys to various apartments with addresses and numbers. Almost all of them were located in the center of the capital. The court subsequently turned some of the apartments in favor of the Moscow depimushchestvo, and another part in favor of bona fide purchasers.
The first verdict in the case was handed down in 2022 by the Khoroshevsky District Court of the capital. The court sentenced the leader of the OPS, Rafael Khamidullin, to nine years in prison, and his six accomplices to terms ranging from four to six years.
At that time, Timur Sadretdinov, the son of lawyer Fail Sadretdinov, was among those convicted. His father is also involved in this case and is on the international wanted list.
A year after the verdict, Khamidullin wrote a confession in which he reported new facts of fraud and the involvement of former policemen Andrei Tolkach, Andrei Velichko and Ruslan Deynichenko in them. In November 2023, all three were detained and sent to jail.
Taking into account the previously received sentence, the Moscow City Court sentenced Khamidullin to 23 years of strict regime (the prosecution asked for a year more for him).
One of Khamidullin's accomplices, Svetlana Nikolaeva, received eight years of probation. Another accomplice, Gennady Dubrovsky, received 16 years of general regime.
The former head of the OMVD of the Presnensky district, police Colonel Andrei Tolkach, the former deputy head of the criminal investigation department of the same department, Major Ruslan Deinichenko, and former policeman Alexander Velichko received 15, 16, and 12 years of strict regime. The prosecution asked for 18, 17 and 16 years for them, respectively.
The defendants were also stripped of their ranks: Tolkacha — the rank of colonel, and Deynichenko and Velichko — police majors and the right to hold positions in law enforcement agencies for a period of three years. The court sentenced all the defendants to various fines ranging from 1 million to 3 million rubles.
During the verdict, the former policemen hid their faces behind medical masks.
A total of 15 people are involved in the case (including two verdicts). The total volume of criminal cases amounted to more than a thousand volumes.
The fourth policeman, district policeman Alexei Barkov, who had already served six years on his first sentence, was acquitted by the Moscow City Court for the lack of corpus delicti in his actions and recognized his right to rehabilitation. This means that Alexey Barkov now has the right to compensation for the damage caused by criminal prosecution, both material and moral.
Barkov received his time served for the fact that, according to investigators, when examining the apartments of the deceased owners, he did not draw up protocols for their documents, but simply took them to himself and informed unidentified persons. The prosecution qualified this as aiding and abetting members of the OPS.
Alexey Barkov's lawyer Margarita Wurts told Izvestia that her client "knew nothing about the criminal group and did not even suspect that it existed."
"The court heard us, and the verdict was completely fair for us," she said.
The lawyer added that now the former district policeman is trying to challenge his previous sentence. The verdict "stood" in cassation, but Barkov is going to file a complaint with the Supreme Court.
How to protect yourself from scammers
Russia has a strict policy of criminal penalties for depriving citizens of the constitutional right to housing, and the timing of the defendants in the case of the massive theft of Moscow real estate demonstrates this, Igor Pastukhov, an adviser to the YUST law firm, told Izvestia. In his opinion, the peak of such crimes occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
— Referring to law enforcement statistics, Svetlana Razvorotneva, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Construction and Housing and Communal Services, told the media that out of 150 cases of owners losing their only home in 2024, 93 occurred in Moscow, but not all of them are related specifically to "black real estate." But I believe that the number of such crimes is at least not growing, as both information resources and legislation are being improved," he said.
To protect your apartment from fraudsters, you should follow the basic rules: do not rush to sign documents without examining them; use the help of a notary, check the reputation of a realtor or real estate agency; do not transfer the original documents before completing the transaction; do not agree to prepaid transactions without proper guarantees; be careful with offers of too low a price, as well as with purchase and sale of real estate by proxy.
— Also, any owner can submit an application to the real estate registry stating that it is impossible to register transactions without personal participation, which is provided by the legislator precisely for these purposes, — said the lawyer.
Most fraud schemes are based on transactions in simple written form, while a notary's certificate guarantees legality, the press service of the Federal Notary Chamber (FNP) told Izvestia.
— Through the database of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other competent authorities, the notary verifies the identities of all parties and the submitted documents, — said the FNP. — Through queries to various federal databases, establishes the seller's authority, checks real estate for seizures and encumbrances, such as mortgages. The notary also establishes hidden facts — violations of the rights of third parties or information about the bankruptcy of the seller.
In addition, the press service of the chamber added, through a notary it is possible to obtain information about the owners of real estate, both current and past, to trace a detailed chain of resales, donations, inheritances.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
