When Fuel Runs Short, Russia's Self-Proclaimed Sorcerers Step In

Desperation has a way of making people vulnerable to wild ideas. And right now, Russia’s fuel crisis—triggered by Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries deep inside the country—is creating the perfect storm for exploitation.

With drivers spending hours at gas stations waiting to refuel at sky-high prices, a new breed of con artists has emerged. Russian news media recently reported that self-proclaimed magicians, clairvoyants, and witches are flooding social media with promises that sound almost too absurd to be real. But they’re out there, and people are paying.

The pitch? Your car’s fuel problems aren’t mechanical—they’re mystical. One common scam claims that a hex, curse, or some kind of negative energy is causing your vehicle to burn through gas faster than it should. The solution, naturally, involves rituals that only these masters of the occult can prepare. For a fee of up to 16,000 rubles ($210), customers are promised spiritual relief from their fuel consumption woes. In one reported case, a witch told her client that a curse had been cast on their car’s fuel tank itself, making it guzzle fuel at an accelerated rate. The price for lifting that curse? You guessed it—16,000 rubles.

But the scams don’t stop there. Some esoteric practitioners are claiming they can actually alter fuel characteristics through incantations and ritual symbols. They promise to transform cheaper AI-92 gasoline into the more expensive AI-100 through nothing but occult intervention. Experts are quick to point out the obvious flaw in this logic: the octane number of fuel depends entirely on its chemical composition and cannot be changed by rituals, symbols, or wishful thinking.

This isn’t even the most creative grift Russia’s desperate drivers are encountering. Last week, reports emerged about increasingly popular fuel pills that allegedly lower fuel consumption—products so dubious that their efficacy has been widely questioned, yet they’re being openly sold at gas stations across the country.

When real solutions feel out of reach, people turn to whatever offers hope. The tragedy here isn’t just that these scammers exist—it’s that a genuine crisis in fuel supply has made them seem almost reasonable to people who are running out of options.