The Children of Lieutenant Schmidt (Russian: Дети лейтенанта Шмидта), a fictional society of swindlers, appeared in the 1931 satirical novel The Little Golden Calf by Ilf and Petrov.
When the latter finally convene, "it turned out that Lieutenant Schmidt had thirty sons, from eighteen to fifty-two years in age, and four daughters, unattractive, and no longer young".
Ostap Bender, being in difficult straits, decides to play the same game, but runs into another trickster (Shura Balaganov, who becomes his accomplice) right in front of a bureaucrat in a Soviet office.
Later they meet yet another "sibling" – Mikhail Panikovsky (Russian: Михаил Самуэлевич Паниковский), who is running for his life (he had ignored the convention, trespassed, and was caught red-handed by victims of yet another "brother").
Since then, the expression "Children of Lieutenant Schmidt" has become a Russian cliché for various fraudulent enterprises and people who use false pretenses to get money, such as claiming to be a war veteran, a "Chernobyl liquidator", or a relative of the victim.