I won’t send a selfie, I’m filthy as hell and unshaven.” Verstka tells the story of a marriage scammer who posed as an ‘SMO’ veteran.

“I won’t send a selfie, I’m filthy as hell and unshaven.” Verstka tells the story of a marriage scammer who posed as an ‘SMO’ veteran.

In 2018, Vladimir Fon-Manstein, a guest on the show Let’s Get Married, called himself a civilian pilot and said he was looking for a flight attendant to be his wife. But it soon emerged that his real surname was Sbitnev, his biography was fictional, and the man was known as a marriage scammer.

A few years later, Sbitnev-Manstein began calling himself a participant in the “SMO.” By the fall of 2024, he was already telling military chats that he had signed a contract, commanded a company, and was taking part in combat. He showed photos of a dog tag and a contract, complained about unpaid combat pay, and wrote about fellow servicemen who had been killed.

“I’m so tired of digging trenches, burying myself in the ground, that I don’t want anything. Just to wash up and sleep,” Manstein wrote in public chats.

People who knew him claimed that he most likely had never been at the front: he had “signed a contract while drunk,” “got out of it through a hospital,” and soon returned home to the Moscow suburbs.

The man used his “veteran” status when meeting women. Just a month after signing the contract, he wrote in a Moscow chat: “Bring me an unmarried lady!!! I got back from the SMO two days ago, I go to the front of the line”. Manstein showed women photos of his dog tag and told them about his wartime “heroics.”

How the former “enthusiastic pilot” turned into a “veteran,” and how other scammers operate by pretending to be “heroes of the SMO” — read Verstka’s report (with VPN):

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Verstka

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