In 2024, telephone scammers began to increasingly use instant messaging to deceive Russians, and the damage from their actions has already reached almost 250 billion rubles, said Stanislav Kuznetsov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sberbank, on the Rossiya 24 TV channel.
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According to him, if the trend continues, the amount could grow to 300 billion rubles by the end of the year. At the same time, about 40-50% of this is traditional telephone fraud.
“About three-quarters of scammers use one of five words when making phone calls. Either it is the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, the Central Bank, or it is a safe account, or fifthly, tell us the code via SMS and then we will save your money. And if one of our citizens hears one of these five words in a phone call from an unknown number, do not hesitate to interrupt the conversation,” Stanislav Kuznetsov advised.
Sberbank has launched an open knowledge library on cybersecurity called “Cibrary”. The resource was created to improve users’ digital and financial literacy. There you can find materials on the most common fraudulent schemes and ways to protect yourself from them.
- In the first six months of 2024, 140 million unique mobile numbers of Russians, as well as 46 million unique email addresses, were leaked online. According to a study by the data leak intelligence and darknet monitoring service DLBI, identity theft has recently been growing at a rate of about 40% per year.
- In fact, the contact details of almost all Russians are publicly available, experts estimate. Fraudsters use this information to trick people using social engineering, as well as to attack businesses.
Author:
Karina Pardaeva
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
