Signing Your Way into the Streets: How So Many Russian Homeless Have Been Cheated out of Their Homes

By Stephen Wilson, one of our writers abroad

'Don't open your door to strangers even if they present themselves as social workers, gas men, electricians, policemen or medical staff.  You can check whether they are authentic by phoning up the police.  At all times you should guard your personal documents.  Don't sign any documents as you could lose money and even sign away your own home.  Don't believe anyone who claims they can provide you with free medicine or offer a discount for expensive medicine,' declares a current public notice on display outside a notary along the Leningradski motorway which cuts through the Russian district of Sokol in Moscow.  

The notice is a warning to people to take precautions against con-artists who cheat vulnerable people out of their apartments.  The con-artists tend to prey on the most vulnerable people such as old persons who may be suffering from dementia, the sick who desperately need expensive medicine, the lonely, people with mental health problems, chronic alcoholics, and the very gullible.  The crafty con-artists manage to persuade people to sign a legal document which grants them the so call 'right' to the person's apartment.  Although this problem has been overstated as a cause of homelessness in Russia {due to the mass media focusing on this issue a lot}, it is still a significant reason for many people ending up on the streets.  

An estimated 10.23% of the homeless in Moscow are the victims of fraud and extortion.  A 2020 report by the homeless charity Nochklezhka in Russia states, 'The victims are primarily lonely elderly people, people brought up in an orphanage and people with mental issues and those who have no one to stand up for them.'

While working with homeless charities myself, I came across some of the victims.  I had the privilege of meeting a kind and helpful homeless Russian teacher of French whos name was Galina.  She had lost her apartment by signing it away.  As an alcoholic with complex issues, she was very vulnerable.  She had gone through suffering which defied the imagination.  It was unpleasant to witness one insensitive woman taunting her as 'a drunkard.'  

I always recall how Galina gave me warm support, and wise words of advice about what to do.  She even intervened to stop two policemen from dragging me away to the police station.  

Ask yourself:  'How many people would ever risk that for someone?'  A lawyer arranged a date for her to turn up in court to fight for the return of her apartment, but she failed to turn up.  We had problems finding her.  Whatever insensitive people might say, to my mind she remains a great heroine who has real soul.

Another homeless woman had been thrown out on the streets by her own daughter.  The woman refused to accept any alternative accommodation and insisted on having her rights restored.  And I have already mentioned in a previous article about how Daniel Ogen encountered a homeless mother whose son, as a drug addict, had sold her apartment without her consent and was therefore in prison.

For some reason it is thought that this problem of cheating people out of their homes had diminished or was simply a bizarre phenomenon of the wild 1990's when there was little law and order.  But this is far from being the case.  On the contrary, you can safely claim that the problem of real estate fraud has worsened because corruption has continued to rise and that property rights in real estate are not secure for any persons who lack legal protection.  The rise of digital technology supplies those criminals with more tools to plan and plot their crimes.  The huge scale of the problem is indicated by the fact that fraud in this sector amounted to 300 billion rubles and had grown by 18% over the past five years up to 2020.  

The fact that a square meter in Moscow can fetch a colossal sum of 890,000 rubles makes this fraud a lucrative business.  The real estate market largely remains unregulated.  The police and the courts more often turn a blind eye to those crimes and can't be bothered to bring the culprits to justice.  

A professor of English was about to sign a way her rights to an apartment until Daniel Ogen and his wife turned up on time to prevent this from happening.  Daniel chased the so called 'social workers' out of the apartment.

Perhaps one of the most horrific crimes was committed in Moscow by the con-artist Roman Mironov and his friends.  Mironov—who married a young flutist Maria Gregorevoi—went on to murder her, two of her brothers and her mother in order to attain their apartment.  'Four lives taken for three rooms,' mentions a Russian journalist Yulia Afanaseva who covered the case in depth.  Despite so many crimes stretching over many years, those criminals were only sentenced in 2020.  Her friend described the victim Maria as ‘very trusting, and naive. She was very easy to deceive.’  She recalls how she had wasted money on a highly expensive and well decorated weapon.  At the time of her murder poor Maria Gregorevoi was pregnant.

There exist a myriad of ways to cheat people.  One way is for a seller, a judge, and a psychiatrist to collude in cheating a buyer out of a purchase by declaring the transaction illegal after the buyer has handed over the money.  They declare it illegal by claiming the seller was 'temporarily insane.'  So the purchase is declared invalid and the buyer loses his money.  This crime has become so prevalent that now sellers are often asked by buyers to produce a certificate of sanity before the deal goes ahead.  

Another common form of abuse is perpetrated by loan sharks.  The investigative Journalist Ivan Golunov, in 2019, found that as many as 500 people who had fallen into debt had signed away the mortgages of their apartments in Moscow.  Due to the fact that those borrowers have signed unfair contracts where they are obliged to pay exorbitant interest rates then the creditor can seize their homes if they are seen to violate the terms of the agreement.  The authorities, instead of pursuing the loan sharks, arrested Ivan Golunov on trumped up charges of possessing and selling drugs in 2019.

The indifference of the police in many of those cases belies belief!  The police only decided to take action in the case of Maria Gregorevoi's family after local neighbors bombarded the local police station with endless phone calls and letters!

Perhaps the best way of defending vulnerable people is of course to issue more public warnings and for neighbors to reach out to the old and the vulnerable who can be very isolated in Moscow.  Some of those old people have practically nobody to turn to if they have a problem.  They are utterly isolated.  You can live in parts of Moscow without speaking to anyone for years.  

Daniel Ogen once told me "Living in such isolation can either make a person patient or mad."  If those people were not so isolated and people constantly checked up on them they would not be so vulnerable.  We should never abandon the wounded to such a cruel fate from such abuse.  

These unfortunate and maddening crimes could easily happen to someone you know!  Perhaps even your mother or grandmother!