“Analyzing the information, I could not find the reason for the discrepancy and turned to Shafigullin. He said that the owner of the company was withdrawing money from the account, ”one of the defendants in the Dengimig case told during interrogation about how his immediate supervisor tricked him into participating in a fraudulent scheme. Now five managers of a well-known microcredit organization will face trial: investigators believe that in two years they stole 79 million rubles from the employer. About how, according to the security forces, the criminal scheme worked and why the defendants consider themselves misled, read in the material “BUSINESS Online”.

On the dock – ordinary employees

Today in Naberezhnye Chelny, on the third attempt, the trial of former Dengimig employees, who, according to investigators, robbed their own employer, starts. On the bench of the defendants was a group of the head of the risk assessment and verification department Dmitry Ivanov – in fact, ordinary programmers. And the organizer of the criminal scheme, Renat Shafigullin, the head of the information technology department of the Dengimig company, went to court in a special order and has already received his punishment. At the end of March, he was given a 3-year suspended sentence with a 4-year probationary period, as well as a fine of 50,000 rubles.

From the materials of the indictment, which were at the disposal of BUSINESS Online, the version of the investigators about the scheme through which the employees withdrew money became known. The organizers of the fraudulent scheme understood that they could not do without the help of employees involved in the control and provision of software through which you can get loans online.

The “close-knit organized group” (this is the wording of the security forces) included the leading specialist in remote monitoring Andrey Alekseev, the chief specialist of the information security department Sergey Golov, programmers Ilnaz Mukminov and Dugar Lopsonov, who were involved in updating the reports. They are accused of committing a crime under paragraphs “a”, “b” part 4 of Art. 158 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Theft”). The maximum punishment is up to 10 years in prison.

“Dengimig” got money: who has been robbing moneylenders from Chelny for years with billions of dollars in turnover?

They, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, were not dragged into a fraudulent scheme by deceit, but they knew perfectly well what they were getting into, and were in a share with their leaders. All participants in the scheme were paid a monthly remuneration in the amount of 40,000–45,000 rubles. With what the employees of the company, who turned out to be defendants in the case, do not agree. But more on that later.

“The organized group, created and led by Ivanov and Shafigullin, was distinguished by its cohesion, the stability of its members and the stability of the distributed criminal roles,” the indictment says. At the same time, it is noted that the participants had a trusting relationship and they spent their leisure time together, which is also denied by some participants in the process.

We changed one character in the numbers of borrowers and transferred money to the cards of nominees

The scheme, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, looked like this: Ivanov received fake SIM cards from Alekseev and other persons, and from Shafigullin the personal data of borrowers with Dengimig. Qiwi virtual bank cards were tied to SIM cards, to which the stolen money was received.

Then the money was transferred to the bank cards of other persons who were not aware of the criminal scheme, which were supplied by a certain Galiev, and he was also unaware of what was happening. The application for receiving money indicated the data of real borrowers and fake individual numbers of borrowers, outwardly very similar to real ones. For example, characters written in Cyrillic changed to Latin, and zeros to the letter “o” and vice versa. The money was cashed out, the SIM cards were destroyed, and the earnings were divided among the participants in the scheme.

How “Dengimig” works

In the 2000s, four Chelny friends who grew up in the same yard – Emil Mukhutdinov, Renat Sirazev, Marat Sabirov and Albert Akhtyamov – decided to open a sought-after business that used to be condemned as usury, and now politically correct – microfinance. To start a business, they themselves got into debt – they took far from a microloan for 5 million rubles. In 2010, we registered a legal entity, Dengimigom Microcredit Company LLC, and opened an office in the 62nd complex of Naberezhnye Chelny.

The company provides loans to persons over 18 in the amount of 1,000 to 20,000 rubles at 1% per day. Only short terms of loans save from mass non-repayment of loans at such an prohibitively high rate – money is issued for a maximum of 16 days, respectively, with an overpayment of 16%.

Now the company employs over 500 employees, who are dispersed among offices in 47 cities of Russia. According to the Kontur.Focus database, at the end of 2017 (latest reporting), the company’s revenue was 1 billion rubles, net profit was 46.6 million.

At the same time, some members of the group involved their friends and relatives in the theft of money. So, Alekseev and Galiev, according to the authorities, used the bank accounts of their friends and relatives, where the money was transferred. “At the same time, Ivanov assured Galiyev of the legitimacy of these actions and the legal origin of the transferred funds, promising him a monetary reward in the amount of 3% to 5% of the transferred funds for the services rendered,” the documents say.

How the scam came to light and what were the excuses

The check of the central bank, which took place in February 2021, as a result of which it became known about the fraudulent scheme, showed that credits under a fake agreement occur three hours after taking a legal loan. The amount of money stolen from a microfinance organization in each case of double lending was the same – 10 thousand rubles each.

The initial audit showed that there were about 7 thousand such “cloned” contracts. And, according to updated data, from November 2018 to December 2020, more than 79 million rubles were stolen from the microfinance company.

At the same time, some of the defendants, as they claimed during interrogations, learned about participation in the criminal scheme only from the media. And the extra 40-45 thousand allegedly was an increase in the unofficial salary, which Shafigullin explained by the fact that he did not want to lose specialists. Employees received this money in cash. In addition, one of the defendants, for example, claims that he did not maintain contact with colleagues at all, since he worked remotely from another city. The testimony of Shafigullin himself differs: in some he claims that the programmers knew about the theft, in others they did not.

In order to somehow explain to employees the discrepancies in the report, which the financial department revealed back in 2019, Shafigullin, investigators believe, came up with a legend. “The difference (in specific reporting and balance sheet) was more than a million rubles. Analyzing the information, I could not find the reason for the discrepancy and turned to Shafigullin. He said that the owner of the company was withdrawing money from the account, so there was a difference and the report generation algorithm needed to be improved so that the owner’s operations were taken into account, ”one of the defendants said in the testimony. Shafigullin gave the employee a list of additional loans to be included in the program. And similar strange cases in the work of the company, when large sums did not enter the system, occurred more than once.

Defendant Mukminov, in his testimony, even claimed that Shafigullin asked him to change the reporting, frightening him with dismissal. “He stressed that this is an instruction from the leadership and in case of refusal he will be laid off,” the documents say.

The lawyer representing the interests of Dengimig in court told the correspondent of BUSINESS Online that the defendants began to compensate the company for the damage caused, but did not specify the amount. The owners of the company declined to comment.