Pensioner Elena Yakovleva (name and surname changed), who works as a music teacher in a kindergarten, was able to sue Pochta Bank for a deposit and loan stolen by fraudsters totaling 1.2 million rubles. This was told to RB.RU by the director of the Golendyaev and Partners law firm, Dmitry Golendyaev, who represented the women’s interests in the Omsk courts.
Information about the claims is also found in the files of arbitration cases, RB.RU is convinced.
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The pensioner turned to a law firm in 2023 after being a victim of telephone scams. The attackers, posing as “Central Bank employees,” stole his six-year pension savings worth 700 thousand rubles and also provided him with two loans of 525 thousand rubles for a period of 30 years.
- According to the lawyer, the scammers acted in a standard manner: they accurately told the pensioner her personal information and convinced her to install a fictitious Sberbank application on Telegram under the pretext of financial protection. The woman fulfilled all the requirements and even told the attackers the code, after which all her money disappeared. When Yakovleva realized that she had been deceived, she contacted Sberbank and Pochta Bank, as well as the police. She was recognized as a victim, but her money was not returned.
Lawyer Golendyaev suggested that the pensioner write a statement to the court. By the decision of the court of first instance, loan agreements signed by fraudsters on behalf of Elena Yakovleva were declared illegal and canceled.
“If Pochta Bank has no legal basis to use a digital code sent to the client’s mobile phone as an electronic signature, due to the lack of a valid contract for remote banking services, loan contracts concluded with the client using an Internet resource not comply with the requirements established by law, which is grounds for declaring them invalid,” the court ruled.
Pochta Bank filed an appeal, but the Omsk Regional Court confirmed the decision of the court of first instance without changes and separately indicated in the ruling the liability of the bank.
“The bank, as a professional participant in legal relations, is obliged to take greater precautions when providing consumers with services for the remote execution of a loan agreement and carrying out transactions with credit and debit cards, and to act with scrupulousness, reasonableness and necessary prudence. ”the court said in a decision cited by the legal firm.
Collectors and bailiffs
Pochta Bank decided not to give up and transferred the pensioner’s debt to a collection agency, says Dmitry Golendyaev. In her words, the agency “simply began to terrorize Elena Alekseevna with numerous calls not only to her phone, but also to her workplace in the kindergarten.”
In addition, in June 2024, Pochta Bank received a court order to collect a pensioner’s debt under one of the loan agreements recognized as illegal and in October 2024 submitted it for execution to the bailiff service. The lawyer managed to cancel the order and initiate a “revocation of the court decision”, since at that time the FSSP had managed to recover money from Elena Alekseevna under an illegal court order and transfer it to Pochta Bank.
Fight for contribution
The pensioner also filed a claim for the return of stolen pension savings, since Post Bank refused to return them voluntarily, Golendyaev noted. The court again sided with the victim and returned the money. The decision was made in absentia in November and will take effect in February 2025, unless the bank appeals. Subsequently, the court will issue an order of execution, which will be presented to the FSSP, and the bailiffs will recover the money from the bank, the lawyer explained.
“In fact, the complete restoration of the rights violated by Pochta Bank of Elena Alekseevna took more than a year, and her case is one of the few in Russia in which a pensioner who suffered from fraudulent actions received full compensation for all damages at the expense of the bank,” said the head of the Golendyaev and Partners law firm.
The lawyer believes that until now in Russia there is a very controversial judicial practice regarding victims’ claims against banks, from whose accounts telephone fraudsters stole funds, mainly by issuing loan contracts to citizens.
“At the same time, the courts in the overwhelming majority of cases sided with the banks, justifying their decision with the argument that if a citizen himself told someone the code of an SMS message, as a result of which “He became a victim of scammers, then he himself is to blame, because it makes no sense to reveal this data to unauthorized people,” the lawyer concluded.
What they say at Pochta Bank
RB.RU asked the credit institution for clarification.
“The cancellation of the loan contract by a court decision is due to the fact that the loan was taken under the influence of third parties, of which the bank was not informed during its execution. At the same time, adequate explanations were given to the client about the obligations associated with the loan. However, the court decision on the second claim has not yet entered into force and has not been received by the bank. By sending the relevant documents, the bank has the right, within one month from the date of receipt, to apply to the court for annulment of the default decision,” they explained in the press service of the credit institution.
At the time of publication, the bank did not respond to the publication’s question about the complaints against the collectors and the court order received against the court decision.
Author:
Ekaterina Strukova
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
