Conviction Divination and fortune-telling services Kostroma, Kostroma Oblast, Russia · 2019

Russia: a request for a drink of water, a curse on the household's money, and 60,000 roubles taken

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

a woman who told a householder that the money kept in her home was under a curse and that she could perform a procedure to remove it

Organization

Leninsky District Court of Kostroma (Ленинский районный суд г. Костромы)

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

The authority is the claimed capacity to divine and to lift a curse from money. The judgment shows the claim doing two distinct pieces of work. It secured entry: the water the victim fetched became the medium for a divination performed in her own kitchen, which converted a stranger at the door into someone conducting a procedure inside. And it secured production of the cash: because the curse was said to be on the money itself, the victim had to bring out 125,000 roubles and hold it available, which is what created the opportunity for part of it to be concealed. The victim was not persuaded to pay for anything — she was persuaded to expose what she had.

Curse or witchcraft threat
Prosperity, divination, or curse-removal claim

Scope decision

The defendant is not named. Russian courts anonymise published judgments as a matter of course, and this record identifies the case by number and court — case no. 1-229/2019, Leninsky District Court of Kostroma — in accordance with CODEBOOK §10. The victim appears as a single initial and is not named. The offence date is redacted in the published text as dd/mm/yy; the year is taken from the case number and judgment date. The charge was theft with unlawful entry rather than fraud, and the defendant contested the entry element while admitting the taking; the record states both because a summary giving only the conviction would omit what was actually in dispute. The 125,000 roubles was handed over for the procedure but not all of it taken: the loss the court found was 60,000 roubles, and that sum was repaid in full before sentence. The two-year term is suspended and is not a period in custody. The judgment records the defendant's own account of her circumstances and occupation; nothing in it is treated by the court as bearing on the offence, and no characterisation of her background is drawn here. The judgment states an appellate route but records no appellate outcome, and none was found.

Evidence structure

Proceedings

2019-08-18 · conviction and sentence at first instance

Leninsky District Court of Kostroma, Kostroma Oblast, Russia (Ленинский районный суд г. Костромы). The defendant, anonymised in the published judgment as ФИО2, was convicted of theft causing significant damage to a citizen with unlawful entry into a dwelling under п.«а» ч.3 ст.158 of the Criminal Code. The court found she approached a woman she did not know on a pretext, asking for a drink of water, and followed her into her flat without her consent; that she performed divination over the water and then, under the pretext of removing a curse from the money kept in the home, received 125,000 roubles from the victim for the procedure; that she saw a further 10,000 roubles on the sideboard; and that, distracting the victim by various means, she concealed 50,000 roubles of the money handed to her together with the 10,000 roubles from the sideboard, causing a loss of 60,000 roubles. The defendant admitted the theft of 60,000 roubles but disputed its classification as committed with unlawful entry into a dwelling. The loss was compensated in full before sentence, the money being handed to the victim on her behalf, and she repeatedly asked the victim's forgiveness during the investigation. She was sentenced to two years' deprivation of liberty, suspended under ст.73 with a two-year probationary period and an obligation to register twice monthly.

Documented coercion mechanisms

a pretext request for a drink of water used to follow the householder inside, which the court found amounted to unlawful entry into a dwelling
divination performed on the spot over the water the victim had fetched — the judgment records that she «стала ей гадать, наговорила воду»
the curse located on the household's cash, so that the victim had to fetch and produce her savings for the procedure
the victim distracted by various means while part of the money she had handed over was concealed in the defendant's clothing, together with further notes spotted under a box on the sideboard

Cited record

Sources

court of record criminal judgment Приговор № 1-229/2019 от 18 августа 2019 г. по делу № 1-229/2019, Ленинский районный суд г. Костромы (Костромская область) — Уголовное.: The full text of the criminal judgment, read directly from the Russian judgments database sudact.ru. The court records that the defendant «под заранее надуманным предлогом, обратилась к ранее незнакомой О, попросив попить воды, а затем, воспользовавшись доверчивостью О, не получив согласия потерпевшей, проследовала за ней в ..., тем самым незаконно проникла в жилище последней», and that «под предлогом снятия порчи с денежных средств, находившихся в доме О, получила от введенной ею в заблуждении потерпевшей для проведения процедуры снятия порчи, денежные средства в сумме 125 000 рублей». The witness account records that «ФИО2 стала ей гадать, наговорила воду. Затем ФИО2 предложила потерпевшей принести деньги, чтобы снять порчу», and that when the victim lifted a box from the sideboard the defendant saw further notes beneath it. Distracting the victim, she «тайно, незаконно завладела, спрятав их в свою одежду, денежными средствами в сумме 50 000 рублей из числа переданных ей потерпевшей и 10 000 рублями, лежащими на полке серванта под коробкой», causing loss «на общую сумму 60 000 рублей». The judgment records that the defendant «не отрицала факт совершения ей кражи денежных средств в размере 60 000 рублей... вместе с тем, подсудимая не согласна, что в её действия квалифицированы как кража с незаконным проникновением в жилище», and that «ущерб потерпевшей возмещен в полном объеме». The operative part convicts under п.«а» ч.3 ст.158 and suspends the two-year term under ст.73.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://sudact.ru/regular/doc/f0tt0QHNPmlx/ Corpus classification: court-of-record; evidentiary role: criminal-judgment.
Retrieval: 2026-07-29 · Preserved; Bound by Fear research cycle 2026-07-29 (Russian-language sweep; full judgment read via the browser pane; the water pretext and entry finding, the divination over the water, the curse-on-the-money framing, the sums handed over and taken, the contested entry element and the full compensation taken verbatim from the judgment)

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