Here’s fodder for you paranoids out there: Popular online social network Odnoklassniki.ru, a Classmates.com clone that reunites school friends from Russia and the former Soviet Union, recently served as an accomplice in two separate cases of identity fraud and really creepy mass murder. What happened to the good old days, when married people just used Odnoklassniki for the innocent pursuit of their first loves and subsequent home wreckers?

Let’s start easy with the triple homicide. A 46-year-old woman stands accused of seeking out people who looked like her on Odnoklassniki and, after befriending them, murdering them, stealing their identities and successfully applying for bank loans in their names. The motive behind the murders? Property ownership. In fact, the alleged killer was caught only after she’d sold the apartment of one of her victims with the victim still in it — comfortably decomposing on the balcony. The couple who found the body called the authorities, certain that the decaying body belonged to the murderer herself. Get it? Because it was her doppelganger!

In light of mass murder, the second story, “Jilted young man creates fraudulent Odnoklassniki account using ex-girlfriend’s name and ‘intimate’ photos,” sounds pretty benign. But, then you find out he did so twice! The accused’s 26-year-old ex-girlfriend first contacted Odnoklassniki directly, asking that the false account be shut down. It was, but ex-boyfriend is apparently the persistent type. When the intimate photos came back up under a new account, the victim decided to take the matter to court. The accused now faces a range of repercussions if convicted: 200,000 rubles in fines (roughly $5,500), one year of community service or up to four months in prison.

As gross as he is, he’s got competition: a 20-year-old hacker was fined 20,000 rubles (roughly $550) in December for breaking into a female friend’s account, reading all her personal correspondences, then replacing her photos with erotic ones of a look-alike. Again with the look-alikes! What can we learn from all of this? That everyone looks the same in Russia. Seriously. How many vulnerable doppelgangers can one country have?

Before the jump: Odnoklassniki.ru
Russian doppelganger killer sought out victims in Internet [RIA Novosti]
Фальшивых одноклассниц рассмотрит суд [Gazeta.ru]

Photo courtesy of Gazeta.ru