The Dolina effect () describes a crisis on the Russian real estate market that started in autumn 2025 due to increased distrust of buyers towards sellers. The term gained wide prominence in media in connection to Larisa Dolina's sale of an upscale apartment in the city centre of Moscow.
Dolina, a Russian singer, fell for a scam and gave away the money she received from an innocent buyer. When the singer realised the mistake, she sued to recover her property from that buyer. She argued that because she was being pressured by scammers to sell her property, the transaction could not be legitimate. In fraud cases like this one, Russian courts often granted the recovery motion but would not order the money back. This is what the trial court ordered. Two appeals left the ruling intact, but the Supreme Court of Russia reversed the verdict.
The lower courts' judicial practice was leaving buyers with neither property nor money even if buyers were honest. This outcome highlighted criminals' abuse of the Civil Code of Russia. Some pretended to have fallen victim of a scam to fraudulently dispossess property buyers with the sanction of Russian courts, which favour sellers. Consequently, Russian mass media coined the term "Dolina scheme" ().
The notoriety of the case disrupted the secondary real estate market in the country as buyers started to become more suspicious of sellers. The scheme often employs pensioners (hence another nickname for the scam, "granny scheme", ), so trust in elderly sellers collapsed. Clients increasingly required additional steps to hedge against the scam, such as inviting additional witnesses, making extra background checks and modifying sale deeds. Dolina herself has suffered heavy damage to her reputation due to the association with the unjust enrichment scheme.
Dolina's case
Facts Larisa Dolina, a Russian singer who was then 68 years old, had a five-bedroom apartment, located in the prestigious district of Khamovniki in central Moscow. Prosecutors estimated its market value at ₽138 million (about $1.55 million at the time of the case). Dolina listed her apartment for ₽130 million through a real estate agent. Polina Lurie (), an unsuspecting buyer, visited with a realtor and then spoke to Dolina herself in the apartment. During the conversation, the buyer ultimately negotiated the price of ₽112 million if paid in cash. According to the trial court ruling, the duo signed a preliminary contract in May 2024, when the buyer paid a ₽1 million deposit. The rest was paid as the final contract was signed the next month inside an Alfa-Bank branch. The women gave the money to a safe deposit box, from which Dolina later withdrew the cash.
In August 2024, the singer declared that she fell victim to fraudsters. According to Dolina, in April, scammers posing as officers of Rosfinmonitoring (a governmental agency combatting financial crime) and the Federal Security Service (FSB) convinced her that criminals wanted to steal her money and take out a mortgage on her apartment. They pressured her to hand over her apartment but assured that the deed would be "a fiction" and that it was monitored by the security services. They also urged to transfer her funds to "safe accounts" and not to tell anyone about her "involvement" with law enforcement. Dolina then gave fraudsters a total of ₽175 million, which included money from the apartment sale, her own savings, and even money borrowed from friends. BBC News Russian speculated that Dolina was probably the unnamed biggest fraud victim of 2024, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs data, as the amount of money in that announcement was roughly the same as in this case.
The singer realized she was swindled out of millions of rubles after the scammers claimed that criminals apparently took out another loan with a different property as collateral, and after she reportedly saw "five sturdy guys" trying to repossess the apartment. Dolina was supposed to hand over the keys in July. However, she first told the buyer that she was on a concert tour, then stopped replying to Lurie's calls and messages, and ultimately refused to move out. The singer sued to recover the apartment from Lurie; Lurie counter-sued to evict the former owner.
Civil lawsuit Article 178 of the Russian Civil Code allows deals to be declared null and void if a party fell victim to deception while signing the agreement and would not have done that had they known about the true state of affairs. Attorneys for Lurie argued the court should not do that as there were no issues apparent during negotiation and the plaintiff seemed to behave appropriately. According to lawyer Natalia Sivonina, uninvolved in the case, it was also reasonable for Lurie to rely on the singer's public fame and her status as a for President Vladimir Putin's electoral campaigns.
Counsel for Dolina disagreed and believed that the singer was, in fact, deceived. They also suggested that Lurie did not do her due diligence when buying the property, as the low price did not raise red flags for her and she did not ask for a health report from a psychiatrist. A report by a court-appointed expert witness in the parallel criminal trial found that the singer was "mentally unstable" at the time of the deal. She refused a similar evaluation for the civil trial.
In March 2025, the district court in Khamovniki agreed with the plaintiff and ordered the property returned. However, the court reasoned that Lurie was not eligible for restitution because it could not "definitively establish the pecuniary character of the deal". It suggested that she could sue the scammers instead (even though she likely wouldn't qualify as a victim of fraud). Appeals to the Moscow City Court (September 2025) and the Second (November 2025) affirmed the ruling. This would have left Lurie with no money, no apartment and a bleak prospect of recovering losses.
Dolina broke the silence around the case on air of the popular Let Them Talk talk show (5 December), long after the popular backlash started and after the second appeal came in her favour. The star promised to return the money to the buyer but admitted she didn't have any at that moment. The lawyer for Lurie dismissed the celebrity's proposal to pay out the loan in installments stretching over three years, without accounting for interest or other expenses, as unacceptably one-sided.
The cassation hearing at Supreme Court of Russia was happening amid heightened interest in the case. Dozens of journalists crowded the chambers. The livestream of the proceedings attracted 523,000 views—the most in the history of the Supreme Court. Lurie won the case, meaning that the deed was found to be valid and she legally became the owner of the apartment. The Supreme Court explained that Dolina was aware about the core purpose of the deal—change of ownership. However, being confused about the purpose of the deal or its legal consequences was not reason enough to overturn the acquisition. The top court also rejected Dolina's argument that the deal should be overturned based on her diminished mental capacity because she did not satisfy the burden of proof required to show it. For this to happen, a court-appointed expert witness had to conduct a separate evaluation for her civil trial, which she had refused. The criminal trial's expert examination was not applicable.
On remand, the Moscow City Court granted the buyer's request to evict Dolina effective immediately (25 December). Lawyers for both sides offered contradictory information on the scope of accommodations that Dolina requested before moving out. Delays caused Lurie's counsel to file paperwork for summoning bailiffs to enforce the eviction ruling. On 19 January 2026, bailiffs witnessed the keys being handed over to the lawyer of the recognised owner of the apartment, apparently ending the matter.
Criminal trial Prosecutors indicted four suspects in relation to the crime. All pled not guilty to grand fraud charges and denied knowing that the funds were used for illicit purposes. Angela Tsyryulnikova, one of the defendants who was also implicated in several similar scams in the Moscow metropolitan area, took the money bag from Dolina, but claimed she was not aware of its contents. She also stated that by doing what she did, she unwittingly acted in another criminal enterprise. In November 2025, a trial court in the Moscow suburb of Balashikha sentenced all defendants to four to seven years of corrective colony and fines of ₽900,000 to ₽1 million. The court found that Tsyryulnikova exchanged the money she took for Tether cryptocurrency, while three other defendants held the "safe accounts" that Dolina transferred the money to and cashed out some of the funds. The singer asked the scammers to return the money she paid them, but the court declined to review the motion.
Outline of Dolina-style scams Dolina's case increased awareness of loopholes that scammers may exploit to defraud property buyers.
One possibility under Russian law is the one that Dolina used—restitution by voiding the deal as fraudulent. Typically, this means the buyer returns the property and the seller gives back the money. However, in the filing, the plaintiff lies to the court that they were themselves conned out of the funds that they are supposed to return, so they get back the property while keeping the money. As a variation of this scheme, the seller may not be a criminal but, when faced with a lawsuit seeking to reverse the transaction, they instead declare bankruptcy. The money is also gone in this case. Another possibility involves a rei vindicatio lawsuit. In this scam, there are two co-conspirators—the original owner (Alice) and the last seller (Bob). Alice sells their real estate (possibly through other intermediaries) to Bob, and Bob then sells it to an uninvolved Charlie. Alice then files a lawsuit alleging that the first transaction was fraudulent as the property was stolen or taken by deception. The court then voids the initial contract, meaning that Alice regains the real estate while Bob has the money from the last sale.
The scheme additionally exploits three factors. The first is the fact that Russian courts treat pensioners more favourably due to the general opinion of them as a vulnerable social group. Thus the schemes disproportionately employ elderly people, who may or may not be accomplices. They coach the pensioners to not appear weird in front of realtors and notaries and to confirm their story when appropriate. Judicial practice was also favourable to the elderly, as restitution was often ordered in one way only—the property would return to the original owner but the money stayed. In fact, Dolina's case is far from isolated and not the first one. Several analyses cited over a dozen verdicts in total in which unsuspecting buyers paid for apartments which were taken away by court rulings, but the courts then did not order compensation. Vedomosti calculated that Russians lost at least 433 million rubles in 2025 alone due to the scam, out of an estimated total of over 8 billion rubles lost due to unauthorised apartment sales.