DPR obliges providers to store user data because of “blue whales”
https://www.site/2017-06-08/v_chelyabinskoy_oblasti_sud_arestoval_koordinatora_gruppy_siniy_kit
IN Chelyabinsk region the court arrested the group coordinator " Blue whale»
Etkulsky district court granted the investigation's request to detain for two months, until August 5, 26-year-old Moscow resident Ilya Sidorov, who is accused of driving a 14-year-old school student in the village of Karataban to suicide. According to the website's correspondent, the young man's defense asked the court for house arrest, explaining that Sidorov did not intend to hide from the investigative authorities.
As it became known from the court hearing, Ilya Sidorov is a native Muscovite. He has a secondary vocational education, works as a postman in Moscow, and is single.
According to investigators, one day before April 15, Sidorov, under the name Ilya Spartak, on the social network VKontakte, decided to drive a schoolgirl from Etkul to suicide. Under the guise of a game, the “Blue Whale” offered to carry out tasks and threatened to kill her and her parents. When the girl refused to complete the last task, he again threatened her. As a result, the schoolgirl tried to commit suicide. Fortunately, doctors managed to save her. It is known that the schoolgirl is currently undergoing treatment in hospital. Also, according to the investigation, Sidorov extorted 23 thousand rubles from her.
On May 18, a criminal case was opened under Article 110 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation regarding the girl’s attempted suicide. On March 6, Sidorov was detained and charged. Today in court Ilya Sidorov said that he admits his guilt and agrees with everything.
Sidorov will not appeal the decision to arrest.
Let us note that when the accused signed the documents after the court decision, the bailiff told him that “it is not written separately with the verb, but oh well.”
“Blue Whale” is a social game distributed on social networks, especially on VKontakte, which is popular among teenagers. According to data from open sources, its essence is that the administrator of a certain community contacts the next victim and gives him 50 tasks one after another - from harmless ones, for example, to draw a whale on a piece of paper, to self-harm. It is believed that in this way the organizers suppress the psyche of children and lead them to the 50th task - suicide.
So decisive and brave online, but in life he was not ready to answer for his actions. Horrible Internet quests are now very popular among teenagers. It all starts with harmless tasks - fill out a form, draw a whale on your hand. But at the end the curator demands that you throw yourself under a train. Psychologists explain: children are unable to stop because they do not understand where the border between life and death lies. And the country has already been overwhelmed by a series of teenage suicides. But who is behind these terrible flash mobs and what goal do they pursue? The correspondent of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company “South Ural” Ksenia Komissarova was looking for answers.
At the moment of arrest, everything was written on his face. These are no longer “toys”. By day, postman Ilya Sidorov, and by night, the author of Internet letters to teenagers, is forced to let law enforcement officers into his Moscow apartment - the alleged crime scene. It turned out that he was bad at covering his tracks and didn’t have time to delete the correspondence, so it was useless to deny:
– Do you understand why you were detained?
- All clear
-What have you done?
- By deception.
-What have you done?
- Gave tasks to the girls.
– Have you created a group?
- No, the group is not mine.
Whether this is true and, if so, whose idea it was to place dangerous “nets” on children on the Internet remains to be seen.
During the interrogation, the postman Sidorov said: 32 people joined the group, and seven girls received his “deadly” letters.
One of them lives in a small village in the Etkulsky district of the Chelyabinsk region. The guardian, whom the seventh-grader calls “mom,” says that she did not notice anything suspicious: the child trusted all the secrets and did not do anything behind her back. And now the face of her daughter’s offender, behind her back, flashes across all television channels.
“Everything was calm, as it was. That's how it goes, that's how it goes. She just spent more time on the Internet. That’s it!” says guardian Iraida Ryzhenkova.
According to investigators, the detained postman first simply corresponded with the schoolgirl on social networks, then began giving assignments. And after refusing to do the latter, he began to threaten that he would kill her and her parents. Also, according to law enforcement officers, the curator of the “death group” extorted money from the child. After all this, a 14-year-old girl tried to commit suicide.
“In May of this year, a 14-year-old girl was taken to the hospital with cut wounds during a suicide attempt,” comments Irina Volk, official representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.
However, for some reason the guardian denies the suicide attempt. She says her daughter just drank some Valoserdin. But the fact that the “Blue Whale” is deadly dangerous game, Iraida Ryzhenkova admits.
“As I understand it, this was supposed to be the last day of her life. Well, that’s what they say, these are the curators there, she must die on this day. But she apparently answered him something and deleted it all. We try not to talk about it. Time will pass, then we will still quietly talk to her. Although she has now realized, she is crying, “Mom, I want to go home,” says guardian Iraida Ryzhenkova.
“The situation that prevailed in the girl’s family and the microclimate at school are being studied, after which conclusions will be drawn about what was the cause of what happened,” explains Vladimir Shishkov, senior assistant to the head of the Investigative Directorate of the Russian Federation Investigative Committee for the Chelyabinsk Region.
“Wake up at 4:20 in the morning,” “cut your hand,” “throw yourself in front of a train at a subway station.” Most likely, this is far from full list the tasks of postman Sidorov, which he gave to children via the Internet. But now the game is over. At a minimum, the suspect will remain in custody for two months. At the most, he will spend five years behind barbed wire.
This week, President Vladimir Putin signed a law that, as amended, tightens penalties for those who try to drive children to suicide. One of the authors of the initiative is State Duma deputy Vladimir Burmatov.
“The fact that we managed to detain the organizer of this “death group”, guilty of the attempted suicide of a South Ural teenager, suggests that we did absolutely the right thing, that we introduced a norm into legislation that now obliges Roskomnadzor to transfer to law enforcement agencies, the police, data about these “death groups” on the Internet,” emphasizes Deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Vladimir Burmatov.
“A law was signed to increase the amount of punishment under this article, but taking into account the fact that the crime was committed before the entry into force of this law, the court will consider this case and impose a punishment within the sanction of the article that existed at that time, that is, up to five years in prison,” notes Etkul district prosecutor Sergei Parfenyuk.
During the search, five cell phones, several SIM cards and a tablet were confiscated from the suspect. What made a young and perhaps healthy man play deadly games with children is still unknown. Also, law enforcement officers must find out who else, besides the Etkul schoolgirl, got into his dangerous networks.
Ksenia Komissarova
The first court hearing in the Blue Whale case took place in the Chelyabinsk region. A man who used social networks to force a schoolgirl from the Etkul district to take her own life was detained in Moscow. So far, this is the only proven crime, but the investigation does not rule out that the instigator may also be responsible for the deaths of children.
The curator of the Blue Whale death group, Ilya Sidorov, did not spare anyone. The young man gave orders to his “subordinates” every day. For beginners - draw a whale on your hand, for experienced players - walk along the edge of the roof, and the finishing task is to commit suicide. And the man was caught by accident. A girl from Etkul tried to kill herself, but failed. The heart drops that the child swallowed at night turned out to be weak. In the morning, straight from class, the teenager was taken to the hospital. And then they started checking.
Tatyana Bespalova, acting school director s. Karataban: “They took her to a medical professional, they called her guardian, they called an ambulance, they took her to the emergency room, they called the police, they called the juvenile commission, and then they revealed that she was in these in social networks".
Parents admit that they began to notice that their daughter wakes up early in the morning and is constantly on the phone. And the day before she tried to commit suicide, the girl had a cut on her hand. They thought it was unrequited love. But the seventh-grader tried to kill herself to save her loved ones. The curators threatened: if she left the game, her mother and brothers would be killed.
"Cut me in pieces, kill everyone else. They, you know, even sent her the address and street! Just the house number. They say he was caught. What if not him?! Okay, my life. What about the children's lives?!"
The curator of the death group turned out to be 26-year-old Ilya Sidorov. Officers spent a month tracking the suspect. He appeared in court today. The guy was detained in Moscow. He worked as an ordinary postman. He carried out terrorism on the Internet, allegedly because he liked the feeling of power.
Sergei Parfenyuk, prosecutor of the Etkul District Prosecutor's Office: “If you get carried away like this and do everything conscientiously, I’m not sure that any adult, having reached the last steps, will say: “No, that’s enough, I’ve played enough.”
Today the first hearing on the Blue Whales case took place. A preventive measure was chosen for the suspect. So far this is the only curator of death groups on Southern Urals, who was detained. Investigators do not rule out that Sidorov may also have children’s lives on his account.
"Why did you do that?!"
It is already known that Sidorov did not supervise the young Whales alone. The suspect's accomplices are now being sought. The guy fully admitted his guilt. He faces 5 years in prison.
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Today, two young Muscovites are being held in detention centers in Chelyabinsk - 26-year-old Ilya Sidorov and a 21-year-old young man, whose name has not been released. Both, through correspondence on social networks, according to investigators, persuaded teenagers to commit suicide.
And if the first was a loner and, in fact, from his own narrow-mindedness, corresponded with one schoolgirl from Etkul, then the second was a real active curator of suicide groups, he not only communicated with the victims, but also coordinated his “colleagues”.
Details of the investigation of criminal cases, frightening statistics and the opinion of the defense of one of the accused are in our material.
Ilya Spartak: lone whale
The first criminal case of incitement to suicide through correspondence on social networks in the Chelyabinsk region was opened on May 18, 2017, when a day earlier a 14-year-old girl Karina (name changed) from Etkul was admitted to the hospital.
On May 16, she swallowed Valoserdin tablets and slightly cut her hands. The schoolgirl was rescued. After studying her page, investigators came to the conclusion that the girl was a victim of the game “Blue Whale” - an unknown user at that time gave her tasks to inflict self-mutilation. At the beginning of June, a person involved in the case appears - 26-year-old postman from Moscow Ilya Sidorov, registered online as Ilya Spartak. He is detained and brought to the Etkul district, where he is taken into custody during the investigation. In court and during the first interrogation, the guy says that he admits everything, that he corresponded with the girl for the sake of his own interest, and also admits that he demanded money from Karina, otherwise threatening to kill her relatives.
Information appears in the media that he was the curator of large suicide groups, but this fact has not been confirmed. In fact, Sidorov turned out to be a loner - he himself was once in a group like “Quiet House” and “Blue Whale”, and then, having nothing better to do, he decided to write to several teenagers, whom he actually found at random in the same groups. Of all of them, only Karina attempted suicide.
“Sidorov will be charged with one count of inducing suicide of a minor (Article 110 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), - said Andrey Mikhalev, head of the investigative department for Korkino Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee of the Region. - He admits that he corresponded with the girl, but claims that he did not force her to do anything. Correspondence with him was carried out over several months, from April to June 2017. The girl attempted suicide on May 16. There is correspondence in the case file. Now the accused is in a psychiatric clinic, where he is undergoing an inpatient psychological and psychiatric examination.”
At the same time, Ilya Sidorov’s capital lawyer, Mikhail S., has a different opinion regarding his client’s involvement in the girl’s May suicide attempt.
“There are deep contradictions in the case. So, I have correspondence between Sidorov and Karina - it begins on June 1, that is, after the girl tried to commit suicide. Before this, apparently, other people corresponded with her, whom the investigation does not want to identify, the lawyer noted. - Sidorov was simply identified, since he, demanding money from Karina, left his number bank card. But demanding money is another article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.”
In the Chelyabinsk region, the court arrested the coordinator of the Blue Whale group
The lawyer partially showed screenshots of the correspondence. Indeed, communication begins on June 1 and looks as if the victim and the accused had not previously corresponded for several months and were not virtually acquainted. In addition, from the conversation it is clear that the girl has already played “Blue Whale”.
“I ask him why you immediately incriminated yourself, and he replies that he simply signed the interrogation report and, again, just like that, out of stupidity, answered all the questions in the affirmative. Sidorov has several diagnoses that cannot be disclosed, but we can say that he wrote to Karina not out of great intelligence and certainly without obvious intent. But Karina was ready for suicide even long before May 16th. I studied her page on social networks - the entire page for a long period of time was saturated with the atmosphere of an impending step into the abyss. Sidorov himself did not create any groups and was not their curator,” the lawyer noted.
Indeed, Karina’s page does not evoke positive emotions. The girl clearly suffered greatly from a difficult relationship with a young man older than her, and was a member of depressive groups such as “Overdose”, “Caspian Cargo”, “Wake Me Up” and others. She periodically posted poems and monologues about how it would be nice to leave this world, and posted photographs with cut and bandaged wrists and notes about unhappy love. So, back on May 6, she posted a photo with a bandaged hand.
The fact that in July 2017 Karina completed what she started - her body was found in the courtyard of the house - also speaks in favor of the fact that the matter may not be the postman.
“I understand everything, my client is far from the smartest person, but he is not the villain that the media made him out to be, why don’t the girl’s family, who should have seen what was happening to her and taken action, ask questions. Her page on social networks is such that it was difficult not to notice the approaching disaster in advance,” the lawyer concluded.
Now Ilya Sidorov, together with his defense lawyer, wrote a statement addressed to the regional prosecutor, where he indicated that he did not know where the girl lived, did not persuade her to commit suicide, and believed that the game was not serious.
“In our case, a criminal case was initiated based on a crime that occurred before amendments were made to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (since June 2017, notes to Article 110 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation provide for punishment for inducing, inciting or facilitating suicide via the Internet). Therefore, in our case, the signs of the objective side of Article 110 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation are active threats, real and feasible, and not imaginary and virtual. There were no such threats,” says the lawyer.
Curator-prodigy
The second criminal case of incitement to suicide, initiated in June 2017, is being investigated in the third department for the investigation of particularly important cases of the Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee for the Chelyabinsk Region. This is the first proceeding in Russia that began after amendments were made to the Criminal Code - on the organization of activities aimed at inducing and inducing suicide (Articles 110.2 and 110.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). There are currently no cases in Russia regarding such cases. judicial practice, nor criminal.
A case of incitement to suicide by inducement through social networks was opened in Chelyabinsk following the suicide attempt of a 14-year-old schoolgirl from the Leninsky district. Serious consequences were avoided here - they literally managed to intercept the tragedy, noticing what games the schoolgirl was playing. She also found irrefutable evidence that she was the victim of not just a loner who decided to have fun, but of a real group that drove residents of Russia and the CIS to suicide.
At the end of June, based on operational materials collected by employees of department “K” of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Chelyabinsk Region, Moscow operatives detained a key curator - he turned out to be a 21-year-old native of Moscow, who lived in the Moscow region and worked as a financier in a major financial corporation. The young man was brought to Chelyabinsk under conditions of the strictest secrecy and taken into custody. The court hearing was then held behind closed doors, the person involved was even covered with his face while he was being led along the court corridor - the investigation tried to keep the process as secret as possible, hoping that the young man would testify against possible accomplices.
A month later, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs published a video of the young man’s detention, including showing his face. But due to the fact that previously there was no official information about him, the media decided that this was already a third arrest, which was associated with the case of Ilya Sidorov, especially since the Ministry of Internal Affairs showed the correspondence of the young man with a certain Karina (the namesake of the victim in the Sidorov case ).
“These two criminal cases are in no way related to each other, the victims are different, the names just coincided. The accused from Etkul was not a curator as such, but here everything is more serious,” said Dmitry Asharin, senior investigator of the third department for the investigation of especially important cases of the Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee of the region. - Our defendant has been charged with committing crimes under three articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - 110 in the old edition (“Incitement to suicide”), part 3 of article 110.1 (“Inducement to commit suicide or assistance in committing suicide”), part 2 of article 110.2 (“Organization activities aimed at inducing suicide using the Internet”). So far, two people have been recognized as victims - a 14-year-old girl from the Leninsky district of Chelyabinsk (that’s why the investigation is being conducted here), as well as an 18-year-old resident of the Amur region.”
According to investigators, the financier is a very smart and educated young man, who registered a number of fake accounts, supervised several suicide groups in 2017 and coordinated the activities of other curators.
“From different pages and on behalf of different persons, the accused corresponded with at least 50 residents of Russia and the CIS countries, whom he persuaded to commit suicide,” said Dmitry Asharin. - I found “victims” on social networks, posting hashtags on my pages: “quiet House”, “Blue Whale”, “wake me up”, “F-57” and others. Users clicked on these tags, fueled by interest after a number of publications on this topic in the federal media. And then work began with them. The accused and those handlers whom he helped processed potential victims, including using methods from psychology. For example, wake up at 4:20. This is a well-known technique in psychology. If a person is raised at this time, then in fact his brain will still be sleeping, but absorbing information. At this time, it is easiest to be persuaded to do rash things.”
After meeting on the social network VKontakte, the accused transferred all correspondence with the victims to Telegram, which had not previously been monitored by the intelligence services at all. Already there, the participants were given tasks. For now, it is only being established whether there are any dead among those with whom the accused “played.”
“The accused partially admits his involvement, without denying only the fact of correspondence,” noted Dmitry Asharin. “But the huge volume of seized material speaks of the young man’s irrefutable involvement and intent. Most likely, he acted simply out of interest. I corresponded with the “victims” at work and at home, virtually around the clock.”
All currently identified victims from prosperous families are characterized very positively.
The investigation is still only at the beginning. The exact number of victims is being established.
Major cities are suffering
More than 10 children and teenagers have died voluntarily since the beginning of 2017 in the Chelyabinsk region. Last year, 28 minors committed suicide, and 15 in 2015. Among them, there were approximately equal numbers of girls and boys.
The Chelyabinsk region is being shaken one after another by tragedies in which minors die
“Statistics for several years show that it is mainly children living in major cities, “there are 62% of them,” noted Lyudmila Elcheva, head of the department for minors and youth affairs of the Chelyabinsk Region Prosecutor’s Office. - Children aged 14-15 years are most susceptible to suicidal feelings. Half of the total number is brought up in two-parent, prosperous families. Only a very small percentage is in orphanages. Only 33% of children leave suicide notes. The reason most often is intra-family conflicts and unhappy love. It's alarming that most of teenagers were bright and active children, favorites at school, participants in competitions, but for various reasons they were unable to cope with certain difficulties.”
According to the prosecutor, in the first half of 2017, 56 violations of the law were identified that could indirectly contribute to children committing suicide. 15 lawsuits were sent to the court to block sites that encouraged suicide.
During the day, the postman from Moscow Ilya Sidorov delivered letters to people. And at night. As the detectives found out, in his public he managed to gather more than 30 teenagers who regularly received tasks from him and called him “mentor.”
One of his charges tried to commit suicide, but, fortunately, she was saved. The schoolgirl spoke in detail about the person who forced her to take pills. Her testimony was enough for Sidorov to be arrested. This decision was made by the Yuzhnouralsk court. The suspect was transported here from the capital. He was detained the day before, right during his work shift.
The postman did not have time to delete the correspondence with the schoolchildren; it ended up in the possession of the police as irrefutable evidence. Sidorov told the operatives that he chose children from difficult families to communicate with. At first, he played the role of an attentive listener, supported, and gave advice. Then the same game began. 50 stages, final suicide. And in order to further intimidate the teenagers, Sidorov called and threatened: if the student is not ready for suicide, he himself will deal with him or his relatives.
The administrator of the “death group” told how he forced children to die. Most likely, Ilya Sidorov will be the first to be charged under the new edition of the article “Incitement to suicide.” The day before, the president signed through online communities. From now on, administrators of so-called “death groups” face up to eight years in prison. Those who openly describe ways to end their life on the Internet, thereby provoking children, can also receive a similar sentence.
Details in NTV report.