Since the beginning of May, the Bank of Russia has initiated the blocking of 38 fraudulent websites with various “offers” of compensation and “return” of stolen money. This was announced on Thursday, May 26, on the website of the regulator.
So, scammers promise to help with compensation for stolen money, create special sites, links to which are sent by e-mail, via SMS or instant messengers. Sometimes scammers call with an offer to issue compensation for stolen funds.
Then the attackers are asked to fill out a form with personal and financial data in order to allegedly check the due amount of the refund and issue it, after which they steal money from the person.
The Central Bank explained that a bank client can count on the return of the stolen amount only if he did not independently transfer money to fraudulent accounts and did not disclose his data to attackers.
“If the money was debited without your consent, then the only legal mechanism to return it is as follows: immediately contact the bank, block the card and write a statement of disagreement with the operation at the bank branch within a day after the incident,” the message says.
On March 19, it was reported that the Central Bank recorded an increase in fraud in the first quarter of 2022. According to the Central Bank, in the first quarter of 2022, Russians transferred money to scammers 258,097 times. At the same time, for the same period in 2021, 237,737 such cases were recorded. In addition, the share of reimbursed funds decreased to 6.2%. In 2021, 7.3% of Russians returned stolen funds.
On May 16, it became known that, according to preliminary data, in the first quarter of 2022, the Bank of Russia initiated the blocking of approximately 90,000 fraudulent phone numbers.
At the same time, the director of the information security department of the regulator, Vadim Uvarov, said in an interview with Izvestia that the attackers began to exploit the topic of sanctions against banks to deceive the Russians. According to him, lately scammers have been calling people under the guise of bank employees and reporting a shortage of cash, including currency.