A man from Sverdlovsk found a phone after a car accident and transferred nearly 50,000 rubles from it to himself.

      In the Sverdlovsk Region, a road service employee will be tried for stealing funds from someone else’s account via a mobile app on a phone he found on the highway.

      The criminal case against a local resident, an employee of the road maintenance service, has been sent to the Tugulym District Court for trial. In August, on the Yekaterinburg–Tyumen highway at the spot where an accident had occurred the day before, the defendant found the victim’s phone. The device had been smashed in the crash and was not working, and it had not been found during the on-site inspection.

      Having found the device the next day, the defendant removed its SIM card and inserted it into a working phone. He then requested information from the bank about the amount of money in the phone owner’s accounts, and via SMS messages made cashless transfers totaling more than 48,000 rubles to his own checking account. The defendant disposed of the stolen funds as he saw fit.

      The man has been charged under paragraph “g” of part 3 of Article 158 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (theft committed from a bank account), the Sverdlovsk Region Prosecutor’s Office reported.