The FSB posted fake job ads offering Russians easy money. People who are struggling, desperate, and economically crushed by four years of wartime inflation clicked. The FSB called it a ‘social experiment.’ The correct word is predation – and it tells you everything about a state that has declared war on its own people.
Here is what happened, stripped of any diplomatic softening:
The Sverdlovsk branch of the FSB – Russia’s domestic intelligence and security service, heir to the KGB, with powers of arrest, surveillance, and prosecution – ran paid advertisements on Telegram. The ads promised easy money. Quick cash. The kind of offer that people who are struggling financially, people who are desperate, people who have been ground down by four years of wartime inflation and economic contraction, might click on.
People clicked. 28,000 people viewed the ads. 176 entered the anonymous Telegram bot the ads linked to. When the bot told them the work would be ‘not entirely legal,’ 40 people left. Those who stayed were offered options: courier deliveries for 50,000-60,000 rubles, or acts of sabotage against infrastructure for up to three million rubles.
Another 56 people left. Ten stayed.
Those ten people – ordinary Russian citizens who clicked on a job ad because they needed money – had their information passed to law enforcement ‘for appropriate action.’ What happened to them afterward, the FSB did not say. The Russian government ran a sting operation against its own economically desperate citizens, disguised as a job advertisement, and then reported the people who fell for it to the police. It called this a ‘social experiment.’ It was a hunt. The prey was ordinary people. The bait was money they needed. The trap was built by the state that is supposed to protect them.
THE NUMBERS: A PORTRAIT OF DESPERATION
Before we examine what the FSB did, let us look at what the FSB found – because the numbers it reported are themselves an indictment of the regime that runs Russia’s economy. 28,000 Russians viewed the fake job ads in a single region. In a matter of days. This is not a statistic about criminality – it is a statistic about economic desperation. 176 Entered the anonymous bot and pressed ‘start’
These are people willing to explore anonymous, potentially illegal work. Under wartime economic conditions. With inflation running at 6% and interest rates at 15%. 136 Stayed in the conversation after being told the work was ‘not entirely legal’. More than three-quarters of those who entered. The state that created this economic desperation is now cataloguing it and calling it a security threat. 10 Made it to the final stage – hearing the sabotage offer. Their information was passed to law enforcement. Their fate: unknown. Their crime: clicking on a job ad. $600-$750 Offered for ‘courier work’. The monthly salary equivalent that was enough to keep people engaged with an obviously suspicious anonymous bot. This is the economic reality of Putin’s Russia in 2026.
Stop at that last figure. The FSB was able to keep desperate people engaged in a conversation about potentially illegal work by offering them the equivalent of roughly one to two months of median Russian wages. This is not evidence of widespread criminal intent among the Russian population. It is evidence of how economically crushed ordinary Russians have become after four years of wartime spending that has consumed the civilian economy while protecting military budgets.
The people who clicked on those ads are not terrorists. They are people who needed money. The state that made them need money so badly is the same state that set the trap.
THE ‘SOCIAL EXPERIMENT’: WHAT THE FSB ACTUALLY CALLED THIS
Elena Dokuchaeva, the FSB spokesperson for the Sverdlovsk branch, appeared on local television to explain the operation. She called it a ‘social experiment.’ “In three hours, we identified 10 people potentially ready to carry out any task for money, including sabotage.”
– Elena Dokuchaeva, FSB Sverdlovsk spokesperson, on local broadcaster OTV
‘Potentially ready.’ Not actually ready. Not planning anything. Not recruited by a foreign power. Not in contact with enemy agents. Potentially ready – meaning: clicked on an anonymous bot, didn’t leave when told the work was illegal, and got as far as hearing the words ‘sabotage’ before presumably the conversation ended.
For this, their information was passed to law enforcement.
Let us be precise about what ‘passed to law enforcement for appropriate action’ means in Putin’s Russia in 2026. It does not mean they were sent a pamphlet about civic responsibility. It does not mean a police officer knocked on their door for an educational chat. It means their names and contact details are now in an FSB database, flagged as persons of interest, subject to ongoing surveillance, and potentially liable for prosecution under laws that are so broadly written that almost any financial desperation can be framed as a security threat.
The FSB did not catch saboteurs. It built a list of people who were desperate enough to consider illegal work, then filed that list with law enforcement. In a country with a functional rule of law, this operation would itself be illegal – a form of entrapment. In Russia, it is broadcast on regional television as a public service announcement.
THE TIMELINE: THIS IS NOT A ONE-OFF
The Meduza report notes, crucially, that this operation was not new when it was publicized in March 2026. The same ‘experiment’ had been reported in November 2025 by a Telegram channel called Antiterror Ural – four months earlier. Almost no one noticed.
Think about what that means. The FSB ran this operation in November 2025. It identified ten people. It passed their information to law enforcement. Then it ran the same operation again, or continued it, and publicized the results in March 2026 – apparently proud enough of the methodology to put an FSB spokesperson on television to explain it.
This is not a one-time experiment. This is a program. A system. A deliberate, institutionalized practice of using fake financial incentives to identify economically vulnerable people and build security files on them.
Across how many regions? With how many ads? How many bots? How many ‘ten people’ have had their information passed to law enforcement across Russia since this methodology was developed? The FSB does not say. It only tells us what it wants us to know: that it is watching, that it is testing, and that the test is ongoing.
THE ECONOMIC CONTEXT: WHY PEOPLE CLICK
The FSB’s ‘experiment’ cannot be understood without understanding the economic reality it exploited.
Russia’s civilian economy in 2026 is, in the words of one Russian Economic Ministry official quoted in a previous investigation, being ‘finished off’ by budget cuts that protect military spending while slashing everything else. Inflation runs persistently above 5%. The central bank’s key interest rate is 15% — making borrowing ruinously expensive for ordinary businesses and households. Fixed capital investment in the civilian sector fell for the first time since 2020. The pension replacement rate has fallen from 35-37% in the early 2010s to just 25% today.
Labor shortages caused by mobilization have pushed nominal wages up in some sectors — but real wages, adjusted for inflation, tell a different story for the millions of Russians not employed in the military-industrial complex. The people who are winning economically in Putin’s Russia are those connected to the war machine. The people who are losing are everyone else.
These are the people the FSB targeted with its ads. People for whom 50,000 rubles – $600 – represents real money. People for whom three million rubles – $37,000 – represents a life-changing sum. People who are economically desperate in a country that created their desperation, then built a trap to catch them in it.
The genius of the operation, from the FSB’s perspective, is that it simultaneously exploits the economic damage the Kremlin’s policies have caused and uses that damage as evidence of a security threat. The regime impoverishes the people, then surveils the people for the desperation the impoverishment creates, then files that desperation as a potential terrorism risk. The victim is the evidence. The perpetrator is the prosecutor.
THE ENTRAPMENT: WHAT EVERY LEGAL SYSTEM EXCEPT RUSSIA’S WOULD CALL THIS
In legal systems built on genuine rule of law – in democratic countries with independent judiciaries and functioning civil liberties protections – what the FSB did has a name: entrapment.
Entrapment is when law enforcement induces a person to commit a crime they would not otherwise have committed, for the purpose of prosecuting them for it. It is illegal in most democracies precisely because it inverts the purpose of law enforcement: instead of catching criminals, it creates them.
The FSB did not catch people planning sabotage. It advertised sabotage, invited people to express interest, and then reported those people to law enforcement. The ‘crime’ – if it can even be called that – was clicking on a bot and not leaving immediately. No plan was made. No act was committed. No infrastructure was targeted. Ten people expressed financial interest in an offer that was itself fake, made by a government agency, using money that was never going to be paid.
Russia does not have an independent judiciary that would throw this out as entrapment. Russia’s courts convict at a rate of over 99% in criminal cases. A judge who rules against an FSB operation is a judge whose career, and possibly freedom, is at risk. So the entrapment is not just legal in Russia – it is celebrated. It is put on regional television. It is described as public service.
“In total, 10 people made it to the end. In three hours, we identified 10 people potentially ready to carry out any task for money, including sabotage.”
– Elena Dokuchaeva, FSB Sverdlovsk – presenting the entrapment of desperate citizens as a security achievement
She said this proudly. On camera. To the public. This is what impunity looks like when it becomes so complete that it no longer even feels the need to hide.
THE PATTERN: THIS IS WHAT THE STATE DOES TO ITS OWN
The FSB’s fake sabotage ads are not an isolated scandal. They are one data point in a pattern of state predation on ordinary Russian citizens that has been documented throughout this series of investigations. Universities are told to recruit students to the military with false promises, using academic blackmail. Students who click on the wrong door end up in ‘Room 212,’ pressured into contracts they cannot legally escape. Young people who try to protest internet censorship are lured into movements that may be FSB-run honeypots, their names collected and handed to police before they attend a single rally.
The FSB profits from the internet censorship infrastructure through the families of its own senior officials, while citizens are left with only a state-monitored app as a communication alternative. Oligarchs are shaken down for ‘voluntary contributions’ to a war they were not consulted about, on terms that are not voluntary, to fund killing they may privately oppose.
And now: economically desperate ordinary citizens are baited with fake job offers, their interest in illegal work – born from the poverty the state created – catalogued and filed as a terrorism risk.
The common thread in every item on that list is the state’s relationship to its own citizens: not protective, not neutral, not even merely indifferent. Predatory. The Russian state under Putin has become an entity that actively hunts the vulnerabilities of ordinary people – their economic desperation, their desire for information, their anger at censorship, their need for education, their grief over dead sons – and converts those vulnerabilities into control mechanisms, revenue streams, or prosecution files.
This is not a government that has made some bad decisions. This is a government that has systematically converted every aspect of citizens’ lives into instruments of its own survival. The war provides the budget emergency that justifies military conscription of students. The poverty provides the desperation that fills FSB honeypots. The internet blockade provides the anger that fills Scarlet Swan’s volunteer database. Everything the regime does to harm its citizens becomes, in the Kremlin’s logic, a tool for identifying and controlling the citizens it has harmed.
THE OUTRAGE THAT MUST BE NAMED
There is a woman named Elena Dokuchaeva who appeared on regional Russian television and explained, calmly and proudly, that her agency had run fake job ads targeting desperate people and that ten of them were now in law enforcement files.
She was not embarrassed. She did not hedge. She did not acknowledge any ethical complexity in running government-funded entrapment operations against citizens in economic distress. She presented it as a success story. A social experiment. A contribution to national security.
This is what the normalization of state predation looks like from the inside. It is not monstrous people cackling over the suffering they cause. It is bureaucrats and spokespersons and regional officials who have so completely internalized the logic of the security state that targeting desperate citizens with fake job ads feels like professional achievement.
The ten people who reached the end of the FSB’s bot — who were probably sitting at a kitchen table somewhere in the Sverdlovsk region, trying to figure out how to make rent, heart beating a little faster at the prospect of three million rubles — those ten people are not threats to Russian security. They are the evidence of what Russian security policy has done to Russia.
They are the cost. The human cost of four years of war, of hollowed civilian economies, of rising prices and stagnant wages and cut pensions and dead sons. They clicked on a job ad because they needed money. The state that made them need money so desperately is now using that need as a weapon against them. And a spokesperson went on television to tell everyone about it, proudly, because in this Russia, that is not a scandal. That is governance.
We should be angry. Not just on behalf of those ten people – though absolutely on their behalf. On behalf of every Russian citizen who lives in a country that spends its intelligence budget hunting them, its security apparatus trapping them, and its media apparatus congratulating itself for the catch.
This is what a state looks like when it has completely abandoned the idea that it exists to serve its citizens. This is the Kremlin in 2026: a predator wearing a government’s face, running ads for easy money, waiting for the desperate to click.
Sources
Meduza (meduza.io), March 25, 2026: Primary report on the FSB ‘social experiment.’
OTV (Sverdlovsk regional broadcaster): Interview with FSB spokesperson Elena Dokuchaeva.
Antiterror Ural (Telegram): Original November 2025 report on the same operation.
Novaya Gazeta Europe: Note connecting the March 2026 report to the November 2025 operation.