I have two thoughts about this, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m nowhere near qualified to say if either of them are even close to the mark.
The first, and probably more optimistic, is that they’re trying to find people who are sympathetic to the pro-ukrainian/anti-putin cause and giving them sort of a plausible deniability to act on those sympathies. That way if they get caught they can say “No of course not, I would never help Ukraine, I love the motherland, the man on the phone said this was good for Russia and that’s why I did it”
The second is that a lot of people out there are just plain stupid. When you listen to even regular run-of-the-mill phone scammers, people fall for some absolutely bullshit stuff, I really wouldn’t be too surprised if you could, with a little perseverance and choosing your words carefully, convince the same kind of people who think it’s perfectly reasonable that the IRS will take payments in the form of Roblox gift cards to go commit arson.
EDIT: those 2 thoughts are based on the assumption that these scammers actually exist, there is also of course, option 3- Russia’s lying or is dumb, there are no scammers doing this, the people doing this know full well what they’re doing, and either A- this is just the government trying to cover it up with a bullshit story about scammers convincing people to do it, or B- that’s the story the people doing this are giving and the Russian government is actually dumb enough to believe it.
I have two thoughts about this, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m nowhere near qualified to say if either of them are even close to the mark.
The first, and probably more optimistic, is that they’re trying to find people who are sympathetic to the pro-ukrainian/anti-putin cause and giving them sort of a plausible deniability to act on those sympathies. That way if they get caught they can say “No of course not, I would never help Ukraine, I love the motherland, the man on the phone said this was good for Russia and that’s why I did it”
The second is that a lot of people out there are just plain stupid. When you listen to even regular run-of-the-mill phone scammers, people fall for some absolutely bullshit stuff, I really wouldn’t be too surprised if you could, with a little perseverance and choosing your words carefully, convince the same kind of people who think it’s perfectly reasonable that the IRS will take payments in the form of Roblox gift cards to go commit arson.
EDIT: those 2 thoughts are based on the assumption that these scammers actually exist, there is also of course, option 3- Russia’s lying or is dumb, there are no scammers doing this, the people doing this know full well what they’re doing, and either A- this is just the government trying to cover it up with a bullshit story about scammers convincing people to do it, or B- that’s the story the people doing this are giving and the Russian government is actually dumb enough to believe it.