A Russian pensioner takes a box of matches into a bank and douses a row of cash machines with flammable liquid.

The 68-year-old lights a match and hesitantly creeps forward with a smartphone in one hand to film what she is about to do.

She dashes it onto the nearest machine, which immediately triggers a huge explosion.

The incident was caught on CCTV in St Petersburg in December and there are no indications the unlikely saboteur’s motivations were political. Instead it appears she – like many others – was duped into it by Ukrainian phone scammers.

One out of 92 arson attacks recorded in Russia in 2024 was politically motivated, the independent Russian news site Meduza reported, with the vast majority resulting from complex scams concocted in murky call centres operating out of enemy territory.

Russian and Ukrainian sources said that the scammers were masters of psychology who use a variety of intricate ruses, some of which seem difficult to fall for – at first glance.

Artyom, a Russian cybersecurity researcher in his 20s living in Moscow who asked not to use his real name, told The Telegraph that older people, scared of authorities after living through the USSR, are particularly vulnerable to one scheme that involves scammers pretending to be agents from the federal security service (FSB).

The “agents” will, for instance, tell their victims that they are under investigation for a crime and demand they torch a location to avoid punishment.

“The whole point is to pressure you. Get you in a state of fear, urgency … they explicitly tell you you cannot talk to anyone, that’s it’s very dangerous. They literally zombify you,” said Artyom.

“This is precisely why all these crazy scripts work … if they were not put in this state of mind, they would never fall for it.”