The Russian Federation has created fraudulent websites to obtain personal data of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and their families, reports the Voice of America, citing the US Defence Department.
The two officials said that Russia's information warfare unit has created at least two phishing websites, WarTears.org and ForeignCombatants.ru, which pose as support communities for friends and relatives of missing, captured or killed Ukrainians. According to them, this is done to detain relatives of the military living in the temporarily occupied territory and deport them to Russia.
Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Coordination Center for the Treatment of POWs, confirmed to Voice of America that both sites are fraudulent. According to him, there are dozens of similar phishing websites that try to collect family data.
"They are exploiting the extremely vulnerable relatives and friends of missing or captured servicemen... [taking] advantage of the fact that Russia does not provide Ukraine with information about those they hold captive," Yatsenko told reporters.
WarTears.org claims to have a database of approximately 170,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
Russia uses the names, phone numbers and addresses of Ukrainians to determine whether any of the soldiers and their families live in the occupied territories. Those who live in the occupied territories can be found, verified, detained, and deported to Russia, U.S. officials said.
According to preliminary data, Russia could have already deported up to 1.6mn Ukrainians during the full-scale war. Particularly they deport children, give them up for adoption with the possibility of completely changing their name, surname, and patronymic to make it impossible to find them.