Russia’s Alfa-Bank mocks the prime minister online, then deletes its joke

On May 25, the employees at Alfa-Bank published a joke on the company's social media accounts lampooning Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s recent comments to Crimean pensioners that “there's simply no more money” in the federal budget for them to be given better pensions and that they should just “hang in there” in the meantime.

Within 24 hours, social media users began distributing an edited photograph of the bank’s ATMs featuring the deleted joke in its start menu. The photograph was an image of the same young woman who customarily appears on the welcome screen of Alfa-Bank’s ATMs and the phrase “hang in there” written across it. This picture went viral online and was reported on by various news sources, including Gazeta.ru. In an interview with TJournal, a bank representative denied that the image in question had appeared on any of the bank’s devices.

Bank representatives insisted that the photograph was a fake and the menu on its ATMs looks entirely different. Though having promised to provide TJ with an explanation as to why the original joke regarding the phrase “hang in there” had been deleted from the company’s social platform, the representatives have failed to do so as of yet.