Five thousand roubles is the average amount of damage from a «meeting» with fraudsters acting posing as bank employees

According to a survey by Kaspersky Lab*, the average amount of damage from the actions of fraudsters posing as employees of banking institutions is 5,000 roubles. This was announced by the company’s expert at a joint online conference with Raiffeisenbank.

According to the survey, in the first half of 2020, more than half of Russians (58%) encountered intruders acting on behalf of banks at least once. In the vast majority of cases (more than 90%), we are talking about telephone fraud, where calls are received mainly during business hours — from Monday to Thursday, from 11 am to 6 pm.

Intruders are seriously preparing for such calls and are actively using social engineering methods. So, in 42% of cases, they correctly provided complete name, surname and patronymic of the person to whom they called. The most common legends were the need to confirm the data (72%), the message about the card blocking (58%) and the loan offer (57%).

In almost half of the cases (46%), intruders tried to get a code from SMS or card data, and in every fifth case (21%) they tried to convince people to transfer money to an allegedly secure account.

«The volume of telephone fraud continues to grow, but, unfortunately, many people still do not know how to recognize fraudsters and are deprived of money as a result of primitive schemes. We remind you that a real employee of a financial institution will never mind ending a conversation, but a fraudster, on the contrary, will make every effort and resort to various psychological tricks so that the person he/she is calling does not hang up. Therefore, in any case, it is better to end the conversation and call the bank’s official number," Sergey Golovanov, the leading expert at Kaspersky Lab, recalls.

The growing interest of fraudsters in a scheme based on the trust of citizens in banking analysts well-known in the market was recorded by Raiffeisenbank experts in the first half of 2020. The names of Denis Porivay and Stanislav Murashov are most commonly used by fraudsters. Scammers call on their behalf to bank clients, offering «investment ideas», schemes for their implementation and details for transferring funds to an account. Immediately after the transaction is completed, the «analyst» disappears, respectively, clients lose money, and real analysts receive damage to reputation.

«Bank analysts never initiate contacts with individuals, do not offer them investment ideas, do not discuss the details of their implementation, do not request personal data, including financial information, and do not offer making any financial transactions. In case of any call from such an «analyst», we recommend hanging up and calling again directly to the bank using the number indicated on the back of the card or on the raif.ru website. It is also worth contacting the bank when you receive a letter of similar content," Pavel Nagin, the Head of the Monitoring and Preventing Cyber Attacks Team of the Information Security Department at Raiffeisenbank, says.

In this regard, Kaspersky Lab and Raiffeisenbank remind you of the basic security rules that will allow you to resist telephone scammers:

• be wary of any calls from people who claim to be bank employees;
• do not follow dubious links from SMS or messages in instant messengers;
• under no circumstances never share CVV and one-time codes from SMS or push notifications to anyone;
• in case of any suspicion, immediately hang up and call the bank yourself using the number indicated on the back of the card;
• install a security solution that detects fraudulent and spam numbers, such as Kaspersky Who Calls.