@xarvos
It's usually a bit more complex than that, it's not just cops you and the wallet, it's something like this: you see a wallet on the ground, you pick it up — doesn't matter if you intend to take it or return it, you just have to pick it up. Then suddenly a stranger appears and says: "I saw what you did there",— he suggests you to split the cash from the wallet and he walks. You do that — he takes some of the money that is usually indeed there and walks away. Suddenly (!) "the original owner" of the wallet — doesn't matter what he looks like, you might've never seen him, accompanied by cops (!) and starts pointing finger at you!
The cops come to you, you tell them that you were planning on returning the wallet, you give it to the one who supposedly lost it, he (or her) counts the cash inside and tells them that a huge part of it is missing.
This is where they offer you to either return the missing money or just bribe them and walk.
When I put it like that it looks like an obvious ploy, but when it happens to you, you are already scared shitless and can't think straight.
This has never happened to me personally, but it did happen to a couple of my friends when they were younger, one of them even managed to regain his composure and made it out without giving them a dime 😂
There are all sorts of setups like this one, some of them involve you hitting a person or another car with your car — none of them were invented in Russia of course and I think are pretty typical for Eastern Europe and maybe even the rest of the world, but some of them are particularly "popular" here. Nowadays people mostly use cards, but some time ago this one was VERY common — to the point of parents warning their soon-to-be-adult kids about it.
@kaia