A disturbing story out of Russia suggests the country is implementing a social credit scheme similar to Communist China’s dystopia where the state tracks all aspects of your life, including social media posts, politics, your friends, religious views and even what you purchase, to determine what rights and freedoms you have.

Breitbart explains the recent developments in Russia:

Social credit systems monitor residents in various ways and feed huge amounts of data about them into algorithms that evaluate the quality of their citizenship, including their loyalty to the ruling regime. Those flagged as “poor citizens” can find themselves automatically stripped of benefits, barred from employment, or prevented from traveling, usually with little chance of appealing the system’s judgments.

The Moscow Times summarized Open Media’s report, which was based on public documents filed by Moscow municipal agencies:

Moscow City Hall has since 2017 been collecting the gender, age, income level, and relationship to other people signed up to its mos.ru website as part of the internet activity monitoring system called IS STATS. 

Open Media reported that Moscow City Hall placed a 280 million ruble ($3.7 million) tender last week to expand the system’s capabilities.

The digital profiles will now include information about Muscovites’ violations, fines, debts, and participation in various events, according to the cited documentation. The data will be compared with information from public Wi-Fi networks and mobile phone operators.

Moscow City Hall will be able to divide the data into groups that include “signs of loyalty,” according to Open Media.

READ: Report: Moscow Plans Social Credit System

In Communist China’s dystopia, the government assigns scores based on your activity. Loyalty to the communist dystopia gains points, other activities cause you to lose them. This not only includes online activity, but with 626 million surveillance cameras, it also includes what you do in the real world. They are even setting up cameras in churches.

If a camera spots you not wearing a seat belt in a car or jaywalking, your score is downgraded. If, your score gets too low, there are consequences.

In an article on Gatestone, Gordon Chang shared journalist Liu Hu’s first-hand experience with the communist regime’s social credit scheme when he was forbidden from taking a flight. Hu said because of his low score:

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school. You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time” 

READ: China’s ‘Digital’ Totalitarian Experiment

Of course, all this sounds vaguely familiar to the Apostle John’s warning about the antichrist and the end times Apocalypse:

¹⁶ It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, ¹⁷ so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name. (Revelation 13:16-17 NIV)