Russians are being lured into Defense Ministry contracts through job listings for guarding Wildberries and Ozon warehouses

Russians are being lured into Defense Ministry contracts through job listings for guarding Wildberries and Ozon warehouses

Over the past few days, about two thousand job ads for warehouse security guards at Wildberries and Ozon have appeared on Avito. As Vyorstka found out, recruiters for contracts to fight in the war against Ukraine may be hiding behind them.

The ads began appearing on the site on August 17. Almost all of them have the same headline: “Guarding WB and Ozon warehouses as part of a MOG group (mobile fire group).”

“Hurry to sign a contract for a выгодная position with a one-time payment before the start of mobilization processes,” the ads say.

A Vyorstka reporter, posing as a job seeker, called the phone numbers listed in two of the ads. The recruiters said that the one-year “special contract” is signed with the Defense Ministry because “Wildberries submitted a request to the Defense Ministry so they wouldn’t be bombed.”

Both of them claim that those who sign a contract with the Defense Ministry will not be sent to the war against Ukraine.

“We need to cover rear units here. Everything is burning every other day for us. But for some reason everyone is afraid of ending up in assault units. We have nothing to do with that and we won’t send you there,” one of the recruiters told Vyorstka.

At the same time, the procedure for processing and preparing the contract is identical to the one offered to participants in the “SMO.” And the phone numbers the recruiters gave the Vyorstka reporter for sending documents are saved in other people’s contact lists as “Olesya SMO” and “Central Military District Commissariat.”

Three Vyorstka interlocutors close to wartime recruiting believe that the Wildberries and Ozon warehouse security ads are a cover for recruiting contract soldiers for the “SMO” zone. “I think this is a typical scam, there are no new procedures now,” a Vyorstka source in Moscow City Hall said.

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