A man in the Volgograd region is at the center of a police investigation for trying to sell a dog collar equipped with a GPS chip and a hidden recording device.
The suspect is accused of violating Article 138.1 of Russia’s Criminal Code — the same crime recently added to the charges against Ruslan Sokolovsky, the blogger in Yekaterinburg who supposedly committed extremism last year by sharing a video of himself playing Pokemon Go inside a cathedral.
When police raided Sokolovsky’s home, they found a pen equipped with a hidden recording device. Earlier this month, the violation of Article 138.1 was added to the existing extremism charges against Sokolovsky.
The maximum sentence for people convicted of possessing such illegal “spy” technology is four years in prison.
According to investigators, the man in the Volgograd region bought the special dog collar last summer from a Chinese online store. He later tried to sell the item, advertising it locally on the Internet. Soon thereafter, in an exciting, dog-collar-busting sting operation, a police officer posed as a buyer and caught him redhanded.
