A female courier who stole several million from pensioners was detained in Yekaterinburg.

      A young woman from Pervouralsk was detained in Uralmash, suspected of stealing several million rubles from pensioners, the press group of the Yekaterinburg police reported.

      In total, pensioners who were deceived by telephone scammers under the pretext of a leak of personal data lost about 3.2 million rubles this week. In each case the courier who arrived to collect the cash was a young woman.

      City criminal investigators, together with colleagues from the regional headquarters, quickly identified and detained an accomplice of the fraudsters. She was detained while attempting to collect 900,000 rubles from another elderly woman at 32 Bakinskikh Komissarov Street. The woman was taken to the Yekaterinburg police department.

      The detainee explained that in the 20s of November an unknown person wrote to her on Telegram offering her a job as a courier. She was to go to Yekaterinburg and collect money from a pensioner at a specified address, then hand the cash over to another person. The courier was promised 25,000 rubles for such work. The woman agreed, sent a selfie with her passport to the "employer" and went to the neighboring city by taxi that the "employers" had ordered for her.

      The courier managed to pick up and pass on two bags of cash: on November 24 in the city center on Lenin Avenue and the next day in the Elmash district. On November 26 her "career" ended in Uralmash, where she was caught red-handed.

      "A criminal case has been opened and is being investigated against the detainee under the article 'Fraud on a particularly large scale.' The punishment for such a crime provides for up to 10 years of imprisonment," the police noted.

      Earlier in Yekaterinburg the woman, on the orders of the fraudsters, set fire to an expensive SUV.