In the spring of 2025, the mother of a child with autism from Tbilisi contacted the editorial office of SOVA: a woman with whom she had taken her children to the same therapy sessions for nearly two years had posed as an employee of Russia’s VTB Bank, collected money from parents for “deposits” and “genetic treatments” in Moscow, and then cut off all contact. Her name was Miranda Tovstik. A year and a half later, one of the victims sent photographs of the court verdict to the newsroom: in September 2026, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced Tovstik to six years in prison for grand fraud and subsequently banned her from leaving Georgia until she pays the money back. The verdict identifies three victims.
What the Court Established
Six years is the minimum prison term under this statute; the maximum is nine. Tbilisi City Court Judge Giorgi Arevadze found Tovstik guilty under Article 180, Part 3, Subparagraph “b” of the Criminal Code of Georgia: grand fraud, defined as causing damages exceeding 10,000 lari. He found neither mitigating nor aggravating circumstances. The judicial rationale explicitly noted that the damages to the victims had not been reimbursed.
Because of these unpaid funds, on September 15, the judge added another clause to the verdict: Tovstik is barred from leaving Georgia until she settles the debt. Article 165 of the Criminal Procedure Code permits such a restriction if the defendant is a Georgian citizen. According to the court ruling, Tovstik holds dual citizenship—Georgian and Russian. Individuals convicted of grand fraud are barred from leaving the country until restitution is made, unless the victims formally waive this restriction in writing.
The court ordered the six-year sentence to be counted from March 26, 2026, and on March 31, the Prosecutor’s Office of Georgia announced that charges had been brought against a woman who had posed as a senior bank official. The agency did not release her name, but the financial figure matched the verdict down to the last lari: 397,760 (around $150,000 at current exchange rates). According to the prosecutor’s office, she was detained pursuant to a judicial warrant; the investigation was conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and she was held in custody until the verdict. The exact circumstances of her arrest were not detailed in the documents.
“We couldn’t believe she [Tovstik] would come back here, given the public outcry and the fact that she was certainly reading social media posts about how we were looking for her,” one of the victims told SOVA.
Yet in late December 2025, six months after the parents had filed their police report, Miranda Tovstik returned to Georgia. “And she was caught at the airport.”
She was not arrested immediately: authorities imposed a travel ban and ordered her to report to the police. There, according to what the investigator told the victims, Tovstik initially made a scene—”I’m going to file a complaint against you”—before breaking down in tears and claiming she had never disappeared and had returned specifically to pay off her debts. She was granted a grace period of a month to a month and a half. During that time, according to a victim, “she walked freely around town, telling everyone: ‘No, I was just on vacation,'” insisting there was no criminal case against her. One of the affected mothers even ran into her by chance at children’s therapy classes.
The victims never saw any money. On the day they were summoned to sign the relevant paperwork, Tovstik was summoned to the police station as well: “And she was detained immediately, never returning home.” Bail was denied; pending her verdict, she was held first in a temporary detention facility and later in the women’s prison in Rustavi. The victim considers this the result of the Georgian investigators’ work: Tovstik “got what she deserved,” having been “caught without a chance to run.”
All three victims took their children to the I. Bokeria Center of Child Neurodevelopment on Politkovskaya Street—the same facility where, according to the verdict, Tovstik took her own children. They transferred money to her account at Bank of Georgia, sometimes directly from the center, or handed it over in cash.
Over eight months, between May 2024 and January 2025, the first victim transferred $74,200, receiving $4,500 back. The second started with cash—€1,000 in March 2024 and $7,000 in April—then transferred another $63,850 over nearly a year; she received $32,309 in return. The third, the father of a child with ASD, sent 59,400 lari in April 2025—just weeks before Tovstik stopped responding. In total, the court calculated damages at 397,760.70 lari.
The defense did not dispute the evidence. Her attorneys rested on two points: the amount to be repaid was lower than what the prosecution claimed, and Tovstik had harbored no intent to deceive anyone. The court took into account the testimony of the victims and three witnesses, bank statements, and inspection protocols of physical evidence. One of the victims also challenged the defense’s calculations in court: according to the defense, she was owed $17,400, whereas her own records indicated $30,541.
Tovstik never admitted guilt. “She dodged and weaved until the very end,” one victim recalls. According to her, on the days the parents testified, the defendant acted smug and “giggled”: “She felt no shame whatsoever.” The victims feared she might manage to confuse the court as well, but their testimonies matched down to the finest detail and were corroborated by chat logs and bank records. “Everything we presented simply added up.”
What Was Known in 2025
SOVA’s initial report on Tovstik was published on June 3, 2025—three weeks after her disappearance. The primary sources were two mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder—Marina and Nina (name changed).
According to them, Miranda claimed she had met with a Russian geneticist named Sergey Kutsev, who allegedly employed an experimental gene therapy to treat children with ASD. The treatment purportedly involved injections into the child’s spinal cord which, depending on the specific mutation, could lead to a 20–30% improvement, and in select cases, even more. As early as 2025, special education specialist Olga Kiryukhina explained to SOVA that there is no scientifically proven medical treatment for autism spectrum disorder.
Tovstik appeared in Tbilisi parenting circles in April 2023. She presented herself as a fellow mother of a special-needs child: she brought her daughter to the same sessions, attended group gatherings, and recommended specialists. She and Nina met in the summer of 2023 at a rehabilitation center, and by New Year’s, Tovstik was already visiting her home. Money was mentioned only in March 2024—nearly a year after she first appeared. “She wormed her way into our trust… and slowly started working us,” one victim described.
Miranda Tovstik disappeared gradually. On May 2, 2025, she stopped showing up for sessions and spent a week and a half texting parents that her daughter was hospitalized with iron poisoning and deteriorating daily. On May 13, she told Marina that an appointment in Moscow had been confirmed, asking her to book flight tickets under Marina’s own passport because her own documents were supposedly inaccessible. The following day, she went silent.
At the time of that publication, little was known about her. No one knew where Tovstik was, and she did not respond to inquiries from the editorial team. Police officially disclosed no details, forcing the parents to look for her on their own. A theory circulated among them that Tovstik held a second Russian passport under the name Eka Shonia; this could not be confirmed at the time, nor was it substantiated by the 2026 court records.
The victims filled in some of the blanks on their own. “We managed to establish the full scale of the scam on our own, not in court,” says one of them. The parents also collected the evidence themselves: chat records on WhatsApp and Telegram, bank statements, and payment receipts. One handed over their entire phone to the investigation; others took screenshots of chat histories manually. “I sat there screenshotting, screenshotting, screenshotting, screenshotting…”, a victim recalled: her correspondence with Tovstik over two years would have amounted to a “five-volume collection.” The parents filed a police report in June 2025 and subsequently located five or six other individuals in Russia who had filed reports there as well. SOVA has not yet been able to independently verify these accounts.
Only three cases made it into the Georgian verdict. The court provided no explanation as to why: the document merely notes that the three victims initially searched for Tovstik together and then went to the police together. According to one victim, there was a fourth woman involved, but her case was omitted: she had returned to Russia, to Yekaterinburg, and had not filed a complaint in Georgia. The Georgian court did not examine the Russian episodes at all and declined to consolidate the cases. “They told us: what happened here is our concern… sort it out over there on your own,” the victim recounted.
How the Scheme Operated
The core story remained the same, but Miranda Tovstik tailored the specifics for each victim. As one victim testified in court, she claimed to have worked at VTB Group and to be managing investments alongside the bank’s top executives: within six months, the funds would yield 150%, and should they be lost, she would personally refund $100,000. To a second victim, she showed account statements and an Excel spreadsheet on her phone, promised returns between 100% and 400%, and offered to sell her apartment on Gagarin Street as collateral. To a third, she explained that she was close to the bank’s senior leadership, that such transactions were conducted “strictly among top executives,” and that she only wanted to help because of their children’s condition.
Trust was reinforced by modest partial refunds. One victim transferred $55,000 to Tovstik and received $20,000 back. Another victim’s husband received 100–130 lari in “income” each month. Another victim had her initial payment returned with a $250 bonus. The verdict explicitly states that returning part of the money “further cemented trust” in Tovstik.
In court, the victims described her final days before disappearing in meticulous detail. On May 1, Miranda Tovstik claimed her father had fallen ill in Moscow; two days later, that she was admitted to the Iashvili Children’s Central Hospital with her child. On May 12, she sent one victim a photograph of a bag packed with US dollars—allegedly containing his money—and asked to borrow 9,000 lari to pay hospital bills, claiming she could not exchange dollars over the weekend. On May 13, she transferred $3,500 to one victim for plane tickets to Moscow. The mother flew out—only to be told at the Moscow hospital that nobody had ever heard of Miranda Tovstik.
The fraudster herself was not in the hospital during those days. “In reality, she flew to Baku on May 2,” one victim says. According to her, Tovstik remained in Azerbaijan until the end of the year.
Where the money went is not specified in the Tbilisi City Court verdict. The investigator told victims that Tovstik withdrew cash from several accounts and simply spent it: “Nothing substantial had been purchased with that money.”
During the investigation, the defense proposed a deal: the victims would withdraw their complaint, and Tovstik would repay the debt on an installment schedule over the course of a year. The parents refused. “She wouldn’t have paid anything back; she would have fled. We said: no, we need it all at once,” one of them explains. The only way Tovstik could have come up with that much money in a year, she added, was: “By robbing someone else… there would have been new victims.”
The victims are attempting to recover their money separately: the criminal verdict does not mandate restitution, and according to one of them, they have filed a civil lawsuit.
Meanwhile, the defense had one month following the delivery of the city court’s September verdict to file an appeal with the Tbilisi Court of Appeals. Whether Tovstik filed an appeal cannot be determined from the documents available to the editorial team: if she did, the case will undergo a new hearing, and the six-year sentence could still be altered.
