Against the backdrop of the worsening Iranian-Israeli conflict, Russian-language media and Telegram channels distributed a video with the logo of The Times of Israel, telling about the crimes of Ukrainian scammers. We have verified the authenticity of this video.
The 30-second story (or rather, in the subtitles for it) reports that from the very beginning of the 12-day war with Iran, Israeli citizens allegedly began receiving calls from scammers posing as officers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and asking to make a donation for the maintenance of the Iron Dome air defense system. It is alleged that all transfers were sent to Ukrainian banks, and in total the scammers managed to receive at least $80 million.
They talked about this EADaily, "Constantinople", as well as many Telegram channels - in particular, "KB"(248,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Bocharik (yep, that same one)" (197,000), "Ivan Utenkov"(134,000), Voblya (129,000) and "Ostashko! Important"(90,000). The news went viral outside the RuNet - for example, the publication of an American far-left resource MintPress News on this topic has received more than 33,000 likes on Instagram.
Ukrainian fraudulent call centers are constant objects of attention in the Russian media. In recent years FSB And Sberbank reported on hundreds of organizations operating in Ukraine whose employees called Russians in order to lure money or induce them to commit sabotage. And even if such call centers are discovered in Russia in reports usually talks about Ukrainian curators. In Ukraine itself there are also such scammers catch, but the problem cannot be eradicated. In 2020, in an investigation into the activities of a Kyiv call center run by Israelis, took part journalists from The Times of Israel.
The Times of Israel is Israel's largest English-language news publication. “Verified” studied publications on its official website, YouTube channel, pages in Facebook, X And Instagram and didn’t find any videos that were even slightly similar to the viral video. It was also not possible to find text notes on the same topic.
Viral video with its design, including music reminds videos shot for The Times of Israel by a photo and video journalist Eli Katzoff. However, his works do not consist exclusively of successive static frames equipped with subtitles - they are usually dynamic and contain only a title from the text. In addition, at the end of such videos the inscription “A film by @elycatzoff” appears, which is not present here.
Other reports from the Israeli publication usually do not contain a logo, and the subtitles are accompanied by voiceover. These subtitles also look completely different.
Moreover, there is no information about the activities of Ukrainian scammers who became more active in Israel after the start of the war with Iran on the websites of other authoritative Israeli publications. The viral report mentions the local police, but they make statements on this topic didn't perform.
The earliest discovered “Verified” publication that contained this video appeared on June 26 at 15:56 Moscow time in the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Shaman Rahu" He repeatedly featured in our analyzes as the primary source of misinformation.
In 2023 and 2024, videos on the same topic appeared on the Internet, mimicking videos from The Times of Israel. In the first case Ukrainian scammers allegedly posed as bank employees and said that because of the Hamas attack, they needed bank card information in order to transfer Israelis’ money to a safe place. The total damage then allegedly amounted to $30 million. Second viral video, released in June 2024, was even more similar to what is being circulated now, a year later: it was alleged that scammers on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Defense were collecting funds for equipment for Israeli soldiers participating in the operation in the Gaza Strip. Even the amount stolen was the same ($80 million), and for the frame about the final point of the transactions, a picture with the office of the Ukrainian Privatbank was also chosen. In both cases described, the videos turned out to be fakes.
Thus, the video about Ukrainian scammers who allegedly defrauded the Israelis of $80 million for the needs of the IDF in June 2025 is fake. It was created and distributed according to a scheme already worked out in past years with the aim of discrediting Ukraine.
Cover photo: social networks
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