No matter how sophisticated the scammers are in getting our money.
“By the way, I recently received a call, supposedly from Mosenergo,” a Komsomolskaya Pravda colleague told me about the matter. “The lady started talking to me in a very professional manner. But I had the strength to hang up and call the organization’s official phone number. They said they never call their clients and praised me for hanging up.
My colleague’s case is not an isolated one: criminals began to actively use the name of this energy company, as well as the State Services portal.
VTB even issued a message on Friday drawing attention to three relatively new ways to withdraw our money. Here they are.
1. Fraudsters call on behalf of employees of the State Services and convince you of the need to update your personal data. The person is persuaded to install a special program on his smartphone, with the help of which the fraudsters gain access to his personal account or banking applications,” VTB warns.
2. The attackers present themselves as Mosenergo employees and claim that in order to replace the electricity and water meters in an apartment, it is necessary to install an application on their smartphone.
3. Scammers pose as buyers of online services to post ads and call sellers on WhatsApp. To view the product, they ask you to turn on the video; during the conversation, the person receives a phishing link. If you click on it, the smartphone screen is locked and the scammer gains access to the data.
“All of these methods have one thing in common: their goal is to introduce a malicious program into your smartphone that will read your data and send it to fraudsters,” Alexander Tokarenko, a member of the Association of Information Security Managers, told KP.RU.
The bank clarified that we are talking about remote access programs that disguise themselves as banking applications or services of large companies. “In this way, fraudsters have the opportunity to control the victim’s smartphone, including online banking: they can withdraw money by transferring it via the fast payment system to different accounts,” the bankers warned.
In fact, resisting these tricks is easy. The safest thing to do is not to engage in conversations, but simply hang up, as our colleague did.
“If you are offered to install an application or visit a website and you do not have the strength to refuse, type its name and go to it yourself through an Internet search engine,” Tokarenko advised. – But we must remember that a search can also provide a link to a phishing site. So you should pay attention to the writing in the address bar of this site. At the moment it will be simple: the name in Latin letters, dot ru, for example. And the phishing one will have a cumbersome set of letters, numbers and symbols. Although the image on the screen may be very similar.
