Gypsy girl with a conclusion: how maternity capital is stolen
In Novosibirsk, the investigation of a high—profile case of embezzlement of almost a quarter of a billion rubles of maternity capital has been completed. A group of nine people is accused of registering more than 600 non-existent children with the registry office. This case is part of a systemic problem that has been undermining one of the state's most socially significant programs for years. The details are in the Izvestia article.
A professional witness
More than 600 children who do not exist in nature were legally born as a result of the criminal activities of an ethnic criminal group in the Novosibirsk region.
"According to the investigation, the man, a resident of the capital region, contacted the multifunctional centers of Moscow and the registry offices of Samara and Nizhny Novgorod. He made deliberately false statements that he was present at the birth at home. After the registration of the birth certificates of the children, the false mothers applied to government agencies for benefits and other social benefits," said Irina Volk, an official representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia.
In order not to get used to the gang members moved around the country. The investigators had to combine 89 criminal cases in 24 regions of the Russian Federation into one. This indicates a trans-regional criminal business built on gaps in interagency cooperation.
The scheme appeared almost simultaneously with the establishment of maternity capital payments. Birth certificates for other people's children were widely received in the Astrakhan region at the beginning of the last decade. It was then that the issue of tightening the conditions for obtaining a document based on birth certificates was raised. However, any children born outside the walls of medical institutions could become hostages of these amendments.
Chronicles of embezzlement payments
The Novosibirsk incident is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, law enforcement agencies have regularly encountered various methods of embezzlement of budget funds aimed at supporting motherhood:
In 2023, a criminal group was identified in the Stavropol Territory, stealing over 50 million rubles. Fraudsters used forged documents on the birth and adoption of children to receive payments.
In 2024, in Moscow and the Moscow region, security forces suppressed the activities of a network that involved medical staff in its schemes to provide fake birth certificates. The damage was estimated at hundreds of millions of rubles.
A scheme involving cashing out maternity capital through fictitious contracts for the purchase and sale of real estate, imaginary educational services, or fake contracts for the construction of houses with shell companies has become widespread. However, it is more correct to consider these abuses as misuse of funds allocated by the state for the child.
"Attempts to misuse legitimate family funds still pose less of a public danger than outright theft of budget funds by registering non—existent people," a police source told Izvestia. — It is likely that the criminal world will use formally valid documents obtained in this way, for example, to evade the responsibility of criminals.
The weak link
An analysis of the disclosed cases points to several system vulnerabilities, the Izvestia source says.
— Firstly, there is a departmental disconnect: the databases of the Registry Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Social Fund and medical institutions still do not form a single impenetrable contour for verification. This is one of the main reasons for having paper babies.
Secondly, there is the human factor and the corruption component, the police officer notes.
— Paperwork at the MFC and registry offices sometimes takes place formally, without proper verification of the accuracy of the information. A number of the disclosed cases involved civil servants.
According to him, the amount of maternity capital (in 2025 — 630.4 thousand rubles for the first child and more than 833 thousand for the second) makes the payment a desirable goal for organized crime.
"Therefore, such payments require a serious security protocol," the source said. — This is a serious challenge. But the measures must be well thought out. Each such case casts a shadow over the entire program, forcing law-abiding citizens who really need support to face increased bureaucratic barriers and suspicion from officials.
Not only ethnic crime
"Linking such criminal schemes exclusively or predominantly with small ethnic groups is a serious oversimplification that leads to the stigmatization of entire nations," emphasizes police Colonel Valentin Stanovov, an expert on ethnic crime. — Crimes of this kind are recorded in a wide variety of social and ethnic environments. Their basis is not ethnicity, but a criminal organization and systemic vulnerabilities.
The expert acknowledges that there is a specific problem in working with some closed ethnic communities.
— There may be ambiguity of family ties, discrepancies in civil status records, loss of documents. This specificity can create grounds for abuse, but it is also a serious social problem for these communities themselves, limiting access to legal rights," he notes.
Thus, the problem is twofold: the vulnerability of the document management system and the social exclusion of individual groups, which are used by the organizers of criminal schemes, says Stanovov.
—Tightening control based on community affiliation is a dubious measure from a legal and ethical point of view," says the former detective. "It contradicts the principle of equality of all before the law and can be regarded as discrimination," the expert says.
He sees total technological modernization as the only true and effective way.
— Biometric identification is a much more promising way. But its implementation should be universal for all citizens without exception. This will solve a whole range of problems, from payment fraud to gray employment. This approach removes the ethnic coloring from the problem, translating it into the plane of improving state services," the source says.
He considers the strengthening of the ESIA and the widespread introduction of biometrics to receive key services to be proactive measures that will work without violating citizens' rights or inflaming ethnic tensions.
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