Members of a group posing as TCC employees are sentenced to prison in Odesa

The Kyiv District Court of Odesa found four members of an organized group who posed as employees of the territorial center for recruitment and social support guilty of extortion.

The court's verdict states that the organizer was an Odesa resident previously convicted of robbery.

The group also included two other Odesa residents who had not been convicted before and a Russian citizen who had been convicted of theft four times by Odesa courts. The leader of the group received information about potential victims from unidentified sources, analyzed it, and passed it on to the perpetrators with instructions on the time, place, and method of extortion.

The group was organized in 2024 and during its activities managed to extort money from three men. To do this, they purchased military uniforms and one set of police uniforms with the appropriate chevrons. They would meet a potential victim near his or her place of residence and ask for documents, such as military records, etc., and then threaten to take him or her to the TCC by pushing them into a car.

The victims were also threatened with the fact that they were already wanted and that they would be sent to the place of hostilities after the TCC. The criminals managed to lure 38 thousand hryvnias from one of the men. Two more men initially gave the perpetrators 7,000 hryvnias each, but the criminals did not stop and demanded two thousand dollars from one of them, but eventually settled for 34,000 hryvnias, and the second man was eventually robbed of 3,000 dollars, which he was carrying in the trunk of his car.

After that, the criminals were detained and pleaded guilty in court and asked not to be punished severely. All four were sentenced to seven years in prison, which is the lowest sentence provided for in Article 189(4) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Extortion). One of the defendants was sentenced to three years in prison for using police uniforms and uniforms, but that sentence was absorbed by the more severe punishment for extortion.

Кирило Бойко