One phone call, a confident voice, a frightening scenario — and within hours, a lifetime’s savings vanish. In Ungheni, a 53-year-old woman lost 229,000 lei to a phone fraud that the Ungheni Police Inspectorate described publicly, as a warning. The good part: the second instalment, another 220,000 lei, never reached the scammers — police intervened in time.
How the scheme worked
The mechanism had three steps, designed to ratchet up the pressure little by little. First, the victim received a code by SMS, which she confirmed. Then she was contacted by a fake bank employee, who alarmed her with the story of a “suspicious transfer” abroad. Finally, a fake representative of the Information and Security Service came on the line, warning her that she risked being arrested by law enforcement if she did not “cooperate.”
Under this pressure, on 23 June the woman handed an unknown person the first instalment — 229,000 lei. The next day, on 24 June, as she was delivering the second instalment, of 220,000 lei, police intervened and caught two couriers red-handed — Ukrainian citizens, aged 44 and 45. The two were placed in custody, and the investigation continues to identify the whole group. Until a final court ruling, they benefit from the presumption of innocence.
It is not only the elderly who are targeted
It is easy to believe such schemes only catch very old people. The Ungheni case says otherwise: the victim is 53, of working age. The scheme does not rely on naivety, but on fear and authority — the name of a bank, then of a security service, spoken over the phone by someone who sounds official.
The phenomenon is far from local or isolated. According to General Police Inspectorate data presented in Parliament, losses from phone and online fraud rose from 40 million lei in 2023 to 272 million in 2025, and in the first five months of 2026 had already exceeded 157 million. Almost three quarters of victims are women.
For Ungheni, it is the third case of its kind we have reported in under a month, after the two couriers detained in an “online investment” fraud and after the explainer on how SIM-card frauds work. The pattern repeats: the money is picked up physically, within minutes, by a “courier” sent to the spot.
What the police say to do
The Police’s official recommendation is simple and worth remembering for anyone:
We urge you to block the phone numbers they give you, not to answer, and to notify the Police immediately at 112.
Police of the Republic of Moldova
The golden rule: a bank or a state institution — the SIS, the police, the tax authority — never asks, over the phone, for codes received by SMS or banking data. Any call that asks you for such things, however official it sounds, is a fraud attempt. Hang up and check directly with the institution, dialling its public number yourself.
The details of the case (the scheme, the figures, the arrests) come from the statement of the Ungheni Police Inspectorate. The prevention recommendations belong to the Police of the Republic of Moldova. The figures on the scale of the phenomenon were presented by the General Police Inspectorate in Parliament, in June 2026. The victim is not identified, and the detained persons benefit from the presumption of innocence until a possible final court ruling.