Yoshkar-Ola, Russia is mentioned there. I'm from Yoshkar-Ola. This kind of scam business exists here at least since the early 2000s. We were once called the capital of such scam business in Russia. I didn't know it's still a thing. One of my acquaintances worked there in around 2005-2007. It was mostly students renting an appartment, rows of PCs. He left right before they were raided by police. Some British individual reported to our authorities and law enforcement acted on it. Never heard about them ever since, before this article.

It's kinda sad that we're associated mostly with Prigozhin in the West (the first thing the OP remembered), although we have other interesting stuff, for example we have probably the last remaining, still practiced pagan religion in Europe: https://hwpi.harvard.edu/pluralismarchive/news/europes-last-...