Karen Grigoryan, the assistant of Oleg Polumordvinov, head of Astrakhan, and eight other people were arrested in the case of extortion through Telegram. This was announced by Alexander Khinshtein, head of the information policy, information technology, and communication committee of the State Duma, writes Gazeta.ru.
Karen Grigoryan was detained on October 5 in Astrakhan and then transferred to Moscow. Yesterday, the Tverskoy District Court granted the motion to detain a group of nine persons, who are charged under Article 163, Part 3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation.
It turned out that Karen Grigoryan owns the Telegram channels, including “Компромат”, “Политбюро”, “Астрахань today” and “Блокнот Астрахань”. Malicious people have published compromising information on Telegram channels.
The social networks were managed by relatives of the suspect.
In order to remove the publications, they demanded money from the victims, starting from 350 thousand rubles to several million. In total, they managed to get more than 3.8 million rubles.
Karen Grigoryan held the position of assistant to Oleg Polumordvinov, head of Astrakhan. He was also the head of the non-governmental interregional human rights organization “Commission on Human Rights and Legality”, as well as the head of the branch of the “Rodina” party from the Astrakhan region.