A 21-year-old Russian man has been sentenced to 12 years in a strict regime penal colony for driving a teenage girl to attempt suicide in a landmark cyberbullying case.
Mikhail Shalimov pursued a seven-month campaign of harassment against Nastya, a 16-year-old schoolgirl from Ufa who was completely unknown to him before they argued online.
The case is considered the first time a cyberbully has been caught and convicted in Russia for systematically stalking a stranger online. The conviction comes as cybersecurity experts warn of a growing darknet market offering harassment as a paid service.
The conflict began in April 2024 in a chat group dedicated to the video game Minecraft. Shalimov, using the alias Maxim Shvedov, argued with Nastya over the name of the group, threatening to leak her data.
Administrators removed him, but he returned under a new account, demanding the teenager beg for forgiveness on her knees. When she refused, he began a relentless stalking campaign that lasted until November 2024.
Fake bomb threats and armed police
Shalimov cloned a SIM card belonging to Nastya's mother, using it to send abusive messages to a building chat group. He made fake bomb threats to a shopping centre, a school and the mother's workplace, and falsely reported her as a missing alcoholic.
He also created channels on a messaging app impersonating the teenager and her father. He posted other people's animal abuse photographs and videos on Nastya's channel, while filling her father's channel with pornography and sending images of genitalia to children.
The teenager began receiving threats from people who saw the messages. Shalimov also paid a local man 4,500 rubles to put up posters around Ufa bearing Nastya's photograph and accusing her of being an animal abuser. Nastya's mother repeatedly contacted police, who advised her to ignore the stalker.
When the teenager started college, Shalimov made fake bomb threats against the institution. Nastya said plainclothes police officers pulled her into a white van without a word as she walked to class. She said she was interrogated for ten hours in front of a psychologist, while her mother was questioned in the next room.
The stalker promised to stop the abuse only if Nastya killed herself. She attempted suicide but was stopped by her mother, who noticed her intentions in time.
Investigators opened a criminal case in October 2024 and arrested Shalimov three months later. They found him living with his mother, stepfather and sisters in the village of Trubichino in the Novgorod region, where he played computer games and sold messaging accounts for 15,000 rubles.
Following his arrest, Shalimov was transferred to Ufa. He was initially charged with committing lewd acts against two or more minors and producing and distributing pornography. Charges of attempting to drive a minor to suicide and making false terrorism reports were added later.
Nastya's mother, identified as Elena, said Shalimov told her he was bored, but she felt she never received a clear answer about his true motives. During police questioning, Shalimov said he enjoyed the feeling of power and the ability to cause death from a distance. The court sentenced him to ten years for the stalking, which resulted in a combined 12 year term due to a previous conviction.
Previous cases and ongoing stalking
Although Shalimov's case is a first for a stranger, Russian courts have previously jailed people for driving victims to suicide online. In 2011, the Lazarevsky district court in Sochi gave 31-year-old Anna Simonenko a 21 month sentence in a penal settlement. Simonenko had used fake social media accounts to spread false claims about her ex-boyfriend's sexual orientation before he killed himself in March 2010.
In 2018, Ilya Sidorov from Moscow was sentenced to three years in a penal settlement in the Chelyabinsk region. He sought out vulnerable teenagers on social media and pressured them to commit suicide through the Blue Whale challenge, resulting in the hospitalisation of a 14-year-old girl.
In September 2025, a court in Kalmykia sentenced five teenagers from the village of Sadovoye to between six and ten years in prison for driving a 14-year-old boy to suicide. Seven high schoolers had gone to the boy's home on the night of March 9, 2025, where they beat him, spat on him and urinated on him, before filming the attack and sharing it online.
Victims who survive often face years of abuse. Vitaliya Kuzovaya said her former boyfriend has stalked her since she ended their relationship in 2019. She said he initially demanded to know her whereabouts, monitored her friends and told men to stop speaking to her.
Kuzovaya said the man later lured her to a garage cooperative, where he held her for several hours and injured her. She moved away from her hometown, but the abuse continued online.
She said he insults her from different accounts, claims to watch her remotely, distributes intimate videos and threatens her. Kuzovaya said he tracked down her workplace at a clothing shop and texted her to say people would wait by her boutique to attack her with acid.
Kuzovaya said her personal data has been leaked and messages have been posted in her name in anti-Russian chat groups. She said police simply advised her to block the man and share less information online. She added that blocking him only provides a brief respite before he creates a new page, and ignoring him seems to push him to try more serious tactics.
Harassment as a service
Online stalking has surged since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Security 2.0 monitoring centre of the Russian Peace Foundation recorded about 10,000 cases of cyberbullying involving minors in Russia in 2025, a 14 percent increase on the previous year. Attackers are increasingly using artificial intelligence to create deepfakes.
Andrey Sidenko, head of child online safety at Kaspersky, said the true scale is likely larger. He noted company research showing 13 percent of Russian children had faced cyberbullying, but parents were only aware of three percent of those cases.
Igor Bederov, head of information and analytical research at T.Hunter, said attackers no longer need technical skills. He said stalkers can find addresses, phone numbers and relatives using open source intelligence tools and leaked databases, starting with just a social media username. He added that even teenagers use these methods.
Sidenko said attackers gather and publish personal information from disparate leaks to form complete dossiers on people, charging between 50 and 4,000 dollars on darknet forums, which the report noted was equivalent to between 4,500 and 336,000 rubles at late September 2026 exchange rates.
Bederov warned that the abuse easily transitions from the virtual world into real life. He said stalkers block SIM cards and bank services, send fake reports to organisations or send emergency services to a victim's address, forcing the target to spend time proving they did not make the calls.
He said the barrier to entry for cybercrime has dropped significantly over the past five or six years, meaning individuals no longer need to build their own teams because every element can be ordered on the darknet like an ordinary shop.
Organised stalking packages
An investigation by Lenta.ru found criminal groups offering a menu of harassment services, promising moral destruction and psychological pressure. Some operators claim to work as a team.
Prices start at 2,000 rubles to block a bank card, send a mood ruining phone call, or launch a daily text message attack. Blocking a SIM card costs 3,000 rubles for 12 hours or 5,000 rubles for 24 hours. A day of non-stop phone calls or threatening calls costs 6,000 rubles, while putting up compromising posters costs 30,000 rubles.
Attackers also sell ready made packages. One group boasted of terrorising victims for years and offered to help customers get even with enemies. A 50,000 ruble package named Kompromat promises to ruin a victim's reputation by spreading fabricated intimate messages.
A 100,000 ruble Karnaval package involves bombarding a target's home with couriers, plumbers and loaders, alongside phone calls and bank blockages. The attackers said this pushes victims to the limit as they forget what a normal life is and spend all their time apologising to delivery drivers.
A 300,000 ruble Pozor package targets the victim's friends and family with intrusive phone calls. The most expensive option, priced at one million rubles, guarantees 30 days of relentless pressure, including sending funeral wreaths to relatives and erecting a monument outside the victim's building, as well as 14 undisclosed actions.
The group described the experience as pure hell that they would not wish on an enemy, claiming to have completed thousands of orders across Russia, though this cannot be verified.
Legal loopholes
Lawyers say prosecuting these cases is difficult because Russian criminal law does not include a specific offence of cyberbullying.
Abuse must be broken down into lesser crimes like slander, privacy violations, or distributing banned materials.
Andrei Grivtsov, a lawyer, said Shalimov's case could only loosely be called the first cyberbullying conviction. He had not heard of such a case before, and said the 12 year sentence was unusual. He said it was only possible because police could charge him with serious existing offences, such as distributing pornography and making false terrorism reports, rather than just threats or insults.
Lawyer Nikolai Gerasimov agreed Shalimov was convicted of specific criminal code articles rather than cyberbullying, adding that catching and punishing the culprit so quickly was an exception driven by the gravity of crimes against a minor.
Gerasimov said victims of less severe harassment struggle to get police to act because crimes like slander are harder to prove and carry lighter sentences.
Grivtsov blamed the poor police response on staff shortages, weak theoretical training, laziness and a focus on easier cases.
Grivtsov argued existing laws are sufficient to prosecute genuinely criminal acts, and predicted the number of cases will rise as daily life moves further online. However, Gerasimov and his colleague Maxim Devyatyarov called for a specific cyberbullying law to unify the legal approach and protect victims before the abuse causes serious harm.
