In recent years, given the worsening economic situation, growing poverty and wide-spread unemployment residents are looking for new ways of earning additional income. One of these opportunities, which has become rampant, is buying up used clothes and footwear from Ashgabat residents and selling them in the provinces.
Female residents knock on the doors and ask the occupants to sell them old clothes. Many have used apparel, which is sold at cheap prices or just given away to the women.
Taking advantage of the fact that the residents of the capital are used to such visits, some women, in groups of 3 to 4, are currently robbing apartments.
One of the females knocks on the door and introduces herself as a buyer of second-hand things.The others are hiding nearby.If it turns out that there are only children or elderly people who live on their own in the apartment, the other females burst in to tie up or threaten the owner while he/she is struggling to gain composure and demand that the latter keep silent.
The females seize all valuables which can be found in the apartment, break landline telephones and disappear quickly covering their faces with a headscarf.
The police do not investigate separate incidents and limit themselves to dispersing women trying to sell second-hand clothes. Such spontaneous markets emerge even in the capital, for instance, in the 11th residential district when early in the morning women sell second hand clothes and footwear.