Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents | Hacker News Reader

Food Delivery Leak Unmasks Russian Security Agents

bellingcat.com

146 pointswebmaven46 comments

So, in Russia, you can order some food, including delivery, for just US $8.76. That's fascinating.

Is that cheap? I've definitely ordered food in Germany for around this amount (€8), including delivery.

I live in Denver and pay $15 at the very lowest. $9 food, $2 tip, $2 tax, $2 platform fees.

Now do the salary comparison.

Pretty sure most people in America aren't making much more than OECD nations. Software engineering isn't the only career out here

You're incorrect about that. Americans earn far more. US median disposable income is far higher than the OECD or EU medians in fact.

It's so high you have to use countries like Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark as peer comparison points for median disposable income.

And the US full-time median income is even higher than the absolute median.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

Denmark is in this list? o-O

I stand corrected. Thank you.

~140k, 6 years experience. Chill job, not a developer.

Maybe that's just me, but I never spent less than €20 for food delivery in the Netherlands.

I traveled to Mauritius and went to a “Whole Foods” style fancy grocery store there. The food was pretty affordable and I was surprised it was relatively cheap. And my friend who lives there said “yeah but you have to take in to account the purchasing power. The average income is very low.”

Also you give the price figure for delivery converted to dollars. But the ruble has crashed hasn’t it? So $8 could be a lot of rubles.

The ruble has largely recovered, though whether that will hold is uncertain. Too many large economies didn't join the sanctions, so the sanctions largely redirected, rather than halted, the flow of goods and money.

even if the ruble recovers, the gdp per capita of russia is ~$12,000.

$9 delivered food is very expensive when you're only making $1000/month. The american GDP per capita is ~$69,700. That $9 meal is like spending $50 in the US it's not throwaway money for the average person.

GDP doesn't reflect household incomes[1].

[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_per_capita_...

this is true for russia as well.

> But the ruble has crashed hasn’t it? So $8 could be a lot of rubles.

is the point I was replying to. Yes, there's a cost of living difference, as well as an income difference. Whether that is new or just a simple fact (such as is the case in pretty much any country with different economics than the US) depends on whether the ruble has been affected by the economic sanctions.

My understanding is that the ruble has been in decline since well before the sanctions. I wasn’t just talking about the recent changes.

EDIT: yeah so it started to tank in 2014 https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=RUB&to=USD&view=10Y

I thought there was a longer term decline in the ruble that affects conversions, beyond what has happened in the last two months.

One of my friends who got deported back to China said she regularly gets delivery to her apartment for about $5.

In Turkey that would be meal for 2 including delivery.

TIL I should be working remote from Turkey. (If only it was that easy)

Taxes and import duties on electronics wiped out this difference for me. Seriously the highest prices I've ever paid for electronics.

Is that....unusual? I can definitely order food with delivery through JustEat or UberEats here in UK for about £7-8(obviously nothing fancy, but I could get a portion of Chinese or a cheap place pizza).

Edit: just tested it - pizza+delivery = £8.40 https://ibb.co/T8pmwCR

Food in UK is cheaper than in USA.

My family’s food bill roughly doubled when we moved from London to New York.

The weird thing is that rent stayed the same, which highlights how much London’s housing costs are out of proportion with other local expenses.

Yeah even in parts of the USA that's not very low. Certainly much closer (if not equal) to food price in a midsized American city in the South than southeast Asia for example

Purchasing power compared through the price of a Big Mac: https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

I can order lunch including delivery for $4.50 in a Brazil small city which is relatively expensive compared to other cities I lived.

I live in Poland and regularly order Uber Eats/Wolt for $6-8.

Is it too imaginative to presume some of these people are food-tasters ordering for higher-ups?

Occam’s Razor would say it’s unlikely.

"Food tasters" seems a little out there, but it's certainly plausible that they're lackeys ordering for higher-ups. Or also probably equally likely, themselves and/or teammates.

> By cross-referencing data points within this leak to independent sources including social media profiles and other leaked databases, we can confirm that it is indeed authentic

[...]

> We searched the phone numbers in the leak for a range of individuals linked to the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence service, whom we have discovered over the past few years.

> One of these numbers is for a man named Yevgeny who was linked to the GRU Academy and was a contact of high-ranking GRU officer Andrei Ilchenko. After searching for his phone number, we found an order he placed to 1st Neopalimovsky Lane 12 in Moscow. This address is publicly listed as being owned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Consular Service. Further research into this individual through leaked Moscow oblast vehicle registration information revealed a license plate to a luxury car, which was photographed in Kyiv in 2019.

> During our investigation into the poisoning of Alexey Navalny by a team of FSB officers, we analysed numerous calls made by phone numbers linked to those carrying out and planning the operation.

> One number which surfaced quite often was to a research institute in Dubna, a northern Moscow suburb. We were unable to identify the owner of this phone number until searching for it within the Yandex.Food leak, which revealed the name of this person, who frequently spoke with the FSB officers planning Navalny’s poisoning.

The funniest part is that the the Russian state security apparatus has facilitated their own doxxing by means of the law passed a couple years ago requiring a lot of this personal data be retained by sites....data which is then sold by the company, an unscrupulous employee, or hackers.

Note to aspiring fascist spooks: collect lots of data...on systems only you can get access to

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