Scammed into selling her apartment, Moscow woman sets it on fire as bailiffs arrive to evict her
A 68-year-old woman in Moscow’s Babushkinsky district set fire to her apartment as bailiffs arrived to evict her, the news outlet Msk1 reported.
The fire broke out around 10 a.m. on August 5 on the second floor of a five-story building on Menzhinsky Street.
The Russian television channel NTV identified the woman as Natalia Ivanova. According to Msk1, she sold her two-room apartment for 9.5 million rubles in 2022, gave the money to scammers, and never moved out. A court ruled in favor of the apartment’s new owner, and Ivanova was scheduled to be evicted on August 5, 2026.
Video published by Msk1 shows bailiffs and several other people standing at the entrance to the apartment as Ivanova tells them: “Where am I supposed to put my things? I have no way to do it, I have no money [to move my things out], nothing.” She then “sprayed a liquid and set fire to her home,” Msk1 reported.
Ivanova was hospitalized at the Sklifosovsky Institute. According to the Russian security services-linked Telegram channel Mash, she suffered burns covering 70% of her body. Firefighters evacuated her neighbor from an apartment on the third floor.
The independent Russian news outlet Mediazona found that Ivanova was detained on October 4, 2022, after throwing a Molotov cocktail — under the influence of scammers — at a draft office on Dmitrovskoe Highway. In court, she said that “at the time of the crime, she believed she was acting solely in the interest of, and to protect, the state.” Ivanova said that starting September 1, 2022, she received calls from scammers who identified themselves as officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service and Russia’s central bank, and she eventually gave them her savings along with the proceeds from her apartment sale. On October 4, shortly after mobilization began in Russia, a man who claimed to be an FSB officer called her and said she needed to “serve the motherland.”
In 2025, a court gave Ivanova a two-year suspended sentence under Russia’s criminal statute against hooliganism.
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