Hoodwinked! Chechen Women Con ISIL Recruiters Out of Thousands of Dollars

Three women from Russia's Republic of Chechnya played tricks on ISIL recruiters to pool money out of them.

The women contacted ISIL recruiters online and established contact with their future "victims." Then the Chechen women began talking to ISIL members and sent them their pictures. As the terrorists began drooling over the new female recruits joining them, the women asked for money to travel to Syria. But when the money was received, the women quickly deactivated their online accounts and vanished.

One of the girls, Maryam, said an unknown man from Syria contacted her online. The two started talking. After a while the man asked Maryam to leave everything behind and to come live with the terrorists in Syria, where "things were always good."

"I told him I don't have the money to travel. He then offered to send me 10,000 rubles ($170) using QIWI transfer," Maryam told LifeNews.ru in an interview.

After receiving the money she stopped talking to the Syrian man. Two other ISIL recruiters also contacted her and Maryam managed to convince them to send 15,000 rubles ($250) and 20,000 rubles ($340), respectively. The two other women also scammed ISIL recruiters for several hundreds of dollars.

The women are currently under house arrest awaiting for their charges. What they did qualifies as fraud under the Russian criminal code with a stiff fine being the minimum penalty and up to 6 years in prison as the maximum penalty.

ISIL is an extremist Sunni militant group that currently controls large areas in Syria and Iraq. The group is notorious for its brutality and numerous human rights violations.

The terrorist organization has recruited thousands of foreigners by utilizing social networking websites especially to target young people. The US National Counterterrorism Center estimates at least 20,000 foreign fighters have joined ISIL to date.