A Russian small business owner faces prison for buying a few GPS trackers

Investigators are debating whether to open a criminal case against Artem Laptev, the founder of the food-delivery service “VkusLab,” for ordering several GPS trackers from China, which he planned to put on his couriers. Since 2011, it’s been illegal in Russia to trade in equipment designed to record information in secret, and Laptev faces up to four years in prison, if charged and convicted. The fact that the couriers would have known about the GPS trackers has apparently not dissuaded law enforcement from moving ahead with their investigation.

For all this trouble, Laptev never even received the GPS trackers. He bought them last July through the Chinese eBay-like website AliExpress, but the shipment was detained by customs officials who flagged the goods as “devices intended for recording information secretly.” Without ever using the trackers, just buying them could be enough for felony charges, Laptev told the newspaper Kommersant, adding that he wasn’t even aware of Russia’s ban on “secret information recording.”

• This wouldn’t be the first enforcement of Criminal Code Article 138.1. In early April 2018, a local man in Volgograd was charged with illegally trading in information recorders when he bought a pair of sunglasses with a built-in video camera. In 2016, a man in Moscow was prosecuted for trying to sell a keychain with a video recorder. The Attorney General’s Office says there’s a government working group currently trying to “tweak” this legislation to clarify when it should apply.