 Many of their voices had a distinct nasal quality, most pronounced in Volodarskiy, which led to the rise of an urban legend that the interpreters wore a noseclip so that the authorities would not be able to identify them by their voice and arrest them.Interviews with many of the interpreters revealed that this was not true, and that authorities generally turned a blind eye to them, focusing their efforts on the distributors of the tapes instead.This was also due to the lack of specific law forbidding the work of these interpreters, and they could only be prosecuted under the relatively minor offence of illicit work.