
“When people are stressed, shocked and vulnerable, they make an easy target,” he says. “If someone tells them they’ve won money, they of course hope it’s true. It’s our goal to make people aware.”
Ruslan Gusseinov has also been scammed several times himself. He wants his experiences to serve as warnings for others, and often gives refugees tips and tricks from his own life to help them detect fraud. Examples include an email claiming he had won a million dollars – or checking his account only to find two outgoing EUR 500 transactions to India.
According to Ruslan Gusseinov, fraud has changed a lot in recent years, and phone calls have become common practice. “Many years ago, these calls weren't investigated in detail, and unfortunately a lot of people lost huge amounts of money. Nowadays, it’s clear there is a pattern to the schemes in Estonia. One way to detect scamming is that callers often have a strong accent and appear to be calling from another country.”