The best defense, as the famous proverb says, is attack. This is exactly the approach that should be used in relation to various attackers. T-Bank came to this conclusion and launched a special robot platform to proactively combat investment fraud called “Cybersquall.” Bots create a flood of requests on financial pyramid sites and then answer calls from fake brokers, keeping their attention. This is a continuation of the bank’s project “Factory of humanoid robots”, which has no analogues in Russia.
In the first nine months of 2024, the Central Bank identified 1.7 times more organizations with signs of financial pyramids than last year. Unscrupulous investment projects are among the most popular types of fraud in terms of the number of cases, and in terms of receipt of average losses, they occupy first place, even ahead of telephone fraud. On average, victims lose 80-100 thousand rubles due to “investments” and pyramid schemes. And the total losses of the Russians amount to billions of rubles.
Cybersquall, created on the basis of artificial intelligence and voice assistants, is designed to make life more difficult for fake brokers.
The artificial intelligence-based technology scans the Internet and looks for sites advertising pseudo-investments. Most fake brokers or financial pyramids have their own pages, and some big ones even have a series of backup sites in case the main ones are blocked. They usually do not contain details about investments, but there are always promises of ultra-high income, no investment risks, and instant payouts. This is the main bait for inexperienced investors.
The scanner’s ML model was trained on 20 thousand similar sites and identifies signs of fraud with an accuracy of 90%. The scanner sends all suspicious pages for further verification to a T-Protection employee to confirm signs of fraud. If the site is confirmed to contain obvious signs of fraud, the service automatically drops hundreds of requests for a free consultation or callback on that site. At the same time, Cybersquall does not have a critical impact on the infrastructure of providers and the performance of sites.
Scammers have no idea that this is a robot. Thinking they are potential victims, they start calling based on applications posted on the site, but end up being humanoid robots. Your task is to keep the criminal on the line as long as possible and prevent him from reaching real people. On average, Cybershkval robots receive between 1,500 and 2,000 fraudulent calls per day. The average duration of a call is 3 to 5 minutes. During this time, the scammers could have “processed” real victims, but in the end they wasted their time.
Most conversations with fake intermediaries follow the same scenario: the scammer clarifies the age, citizenship and checks if the victim is bankrupt. This is necessary to evaluate the financial situation of the victim and the possibility of obtaining loans. They clarify whether the potential victim has investment experience and also use familiar terms (assets, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, etc.) to gain trust. And at the end, the client is promised interaction with an experienced VIP analyst who has a limited number of clients. In comparison, real employees of financial institutions only ask questions about the specific investment product that the client has chosen and do not guarantee specific income from investment activities, as this is prohibited by law.
– Financial pyramids are mutating and transforming; Instead of MMM bills, scammers now use beautiful websites with pseudo-stock growth charts and rent offices in business centers to show off. Every week we identify 50 new pyramid sites. They attract Russians with promises of high income and risk-free investments, but in the end the person is left with a bunch of loans, no savings, and the offices of these “brokers” simply disappear in an instant.
Unfortunately, these victims are the most difficult to convince to invest in dubious projects. Fake brokers pay them a certain amount, the person trusts that he will be able to get rich quickly and often deceives the bank employee about the true purpose of his transfers, explains Oleg Zamiralov, director of the Center for Ecosystem Protection of T- Bank.
According to him, that is why it was decided to act proactively: infiltrate the criminals’ lair with the help of saboteur robots, create an avalanche of fake applications, confuse scammers and waste their time.
Some of the fraudulent calls are redirected to the bank’s new Fraud Roulette project, where calls from telephone scammers are intercepted in real time and transferred to users. Currently, the project is in the active testing stage and the first users who have access to it, along with bots, can also communicate with fake intermediaries and keep them online.
Additionally, the resulting conversations between bots and scammers are used to train bank employees in new security scenarios and technologies such as Neuroshield, anti-spam, caller ID, and others. In the future, the bank intends to send data from phishing sites not only to the Central Bank’s lists, but also to providers in whose networks scammers create their pages.
