Agents offered money to place anti-NATO stickers in Brussels EU Quarter

A pan-European journalistic investigation published on 12 March 2025 documented how people were offered small cryptocurrency payments to carry out low-risk influence tasks in Brussels, including placing anti-NATO stickers in the EU Quarter. The investigation, branded "Playing with Fire," was coordinated through the European Broadcasting Union's Investigative Journalist Network and involved public broadcasters from several countries, among them VRT (Belgium) and RTVE (Spain).

A VRT reporter spent months inside a pro-Russian group on Telegram with roughly 8,000 to 8,500 members, posing as a Russia-sympathising Brussels resident with limited technical skills. After the group's operators questioned him to confirm his views were ideologically aligned, he was assigned a first, low-risk task: place ten stickers reading "Fuck NATO" in prominent spots in the heart of Brussels, the city that hosts both EU and NATO headquarters. The reward was about 50 US dollars in the group's own crypto coin.

According to the reporting, tasks were posted automatically in the chat by a bot, and members could claim them with a single click. The stickers were shipped from a Chinese vendor to a pre-arranged address, though the journalist did not carry out the assignment. Other tasks ranged from collecting email addresses of Belgian journalists to higher-risk sabotage offers elsewhere in Europe. The investigation cited Belgium's State Security Service (VSSE) describing increasing reliance on "disposable agents," while the country's military intelligence service warned that recruits often "don't really know who their interlocutors are."

The Russia link is assessed and suspected rather than proven for this specific Brussels sticker task: attribution rests on the investigation's infiltration of a self-described pro-Russian group and on security-service characterisations of the recruitment pattern. The case fits a broader documented method in which Russia-linked handlers use Telegram bots and intermediaries to hire low-level, often unwitting operatives for cheap influence and sabotage actions, paying in cryptocurrency. The action itself (stickers) is minor, but it illustrates a scalable scheme that escalates to arson and infrastructure sabotage elsewhere.