Fraudsters began to send the Russians an SMS with a code for registering an account of a legal entity or individual entrepreneur in a bank, Izvestia learned. The Izvestia correspondent was faced with this when he received a message about “registration in the guest area for legal entities on the Sberbank website”. Internet users shared similar stories in April.
The Sber call center told Izvestia that the bank’s website has a section where an individual entrepreneur or a legal entity can apply to open a current account. But after that, you need to go through a few more steps: on the site you need to fill in information about the organization (including TIN), choose an office for service, confirm the application and at the last stage the company will receive the account details, the credit institution explained.
Kaspersky Lab recorded a fraudulent scheme with a “registration in the guest zone for legal entities” code. Usually it is sent to arouse the victim’s confidence and prove that the call is indeed a bank employee, said the chief expert of the company Sergei Golovanov.
Perhaps, they wanted to open a current account for an individual entrepreneur or self-employed on the person’s number: in the future, scammers could convince the person of the need to transfer money to him, use this account for cashing out or for obtaining a loan, suggested Alexander Dvoryansky, director of strategic communications at Infosecurity a Softline company.
According to the Central Bank, for the whole of 2020, fraudsters made 773 thousand transactions without the consent of the client, for a total amount of about 9.8 billion rubles.
Read more in the exclusive material from Izvestia:
Extra account: scammers began to send codes to register an individual entrepreneur account