Messenger correspondence, one personal meeting, a stamp in the passport — and a few months later, several million rubles in compensation for the death of a husband whom the bride knew for only a few days arrive in the account. While soldiers die on the front lines, a market for sham marriages has emerged in the rear, concluded solely for state payments for their deaths.

In Russia, a name has even been coined for this phenomenon — "Black Widows."

Origin of the Term

The term "Black Widows" came into circulation after the announcement of mobilization in 2022. At that time, the marriage registration procedure was maximally simplified for men going to the front — for entirely humane reasons: to allow them to quickly formalize relationships before deployment. This same simplified procedure proved to be a convenient loophole for fraud.

How It Works

The scheme is simple. Women — sometimes acting alone, sometimes as part of organized groups — deliberately seek out servicemen who are about to sign a contract or be deployed to a combat zone. Acquaintance, correspondence, one or two personal meetings — and marriage registration at the ZAGS (civil registry office) a few days or even just one day before departure.

If a serviceman dies, it is the official spouse who receives the right to multi-million ruble state payments allocated to the families of fallen participants of the "Special Military Operation" (SVO) — regardless of how many days the marriage lasted or whether the deceased's parents knew about the bride.

Specific Cases

In Ussuriysk (Primorsky Krai), FSB and UEBiPK (Department for Economic Security and Anti-Corruption) officers in January 2026 thwarted an attempt to embezzle payments for a deceased serviceman: a woman and her cohabitant had already received 15 million rubles and were attempting to claim the apartment allocated to the soldier.

In Vladivostok, the prosecutor's office successfully sought in court the annulment of a marriage registered in March 2025: the woman married a serviceman before his deployment to the SVO zone, not intending to create a family, but solely for the sake of payments in the event of his death.

In Bashkortostan, a marriage was registered one day before the contract was signed. The "widow" already had a criminal record for bank card fraud — by a fortunate turn of events for her, the court had then imposed a suspended sentence. The parents of the fallen soldier received not a single ruble: everything was taken by the woman they had never met before.

In the Arkhangelsk Oblast and Nenets Autonomous Okrug, an organized group of three people was apprehended in August 2025 — their arrest required the involvement of OMON (Special Purpose Mobile Unit) fighters from Rosgvardiya (Russian National Guard), indicating the seriousness of the operation.

Open Training on the Scheme

The scheme has become so normalized that some of its participants openly teach it. A woman under a Telegram username recorded videos in which she smirked while explaining to her subscribers how to "properly" marry an SVO soldier, register children in his name, and receive maximum payouts.

"Scam on Bones"

Alongside sham marriages, investigations are also uncovering a darker variation of the same scheme: fraudsters, getting rid of the true relatives of deceased servicemen, forge documents to obtain heir status and payments themselves. In some such cases, investigators do not rule out the possibility of premeditated murder.

The State Noticed the Problem — Proposes Amendments

In 2026, Maria Voropaeva, First Deputy Head of the LDPR Central Apparatus and Moscow City Duma Deputy, publicly spoke about the problem, calling sham marriages a "cynical mockery of the heroes' feat." She proposed tightening criminal liability for such marriages and seeking full recovery of illegally obtained payments.

For now, these proposals remain the initiative of a single deputy, not an adopted law — and new episodes of the same scheme continue to be uncovered in various regions of the country.

In Conclusion

The payment system was created to support the families of the fallen. Instead, it has spawned a market where a stamp in a passport, placed one day before deployment to the front, has become a type of lottery ticket. In this scheme, the parents of fallen soldiers systematically turn out to be the last to learn that their son had a wife — because they find out only after she has already claimed the money.