The Anti-Fraud service for the Interior Ministry’s mobile application, which is supposed to protect citizens from phone deceptions, will be developed by the end of the year. How will it work and will it really help in the fight against intruders – in the material of Izvestia.
Table Of Contents
Alarm call
It became known in February that for the mobile application of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, through which one can only obtain data on wanted criminals and urgently call the police, they are going to develop the Anti-Fraud service. Then the ministry announced a tender for the completion of the application in the amount of 63 million rubles, as reported by Kommersant.
As it turned out now, the contract with the developer was signed at the end of March, as reported to TASS in the press center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Now the cost of the work is estimated at 45 million rubles, and their completion is scheduled for December 25, 2021.
The service will inform the user of the phone on which the application is installed that they are calling or sending messages from the number that was previously used to commit illegal actions. When calling from an unknown number, “Anti-Fraudster” will compare it with the list of intruders, which is at the disposal of the police, and send a corresponding warning. These phones can be blocked.
In addition, a “white list” will appear in the application. It will be possible to independently enter numbers there, which do not need to be checked and blocked.
Continuous updating
The initiative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to create a mobile service was supported by the State Duma. According to Adalbi Shkhagoshev, a member of the Security and Anti-Corruption Committee, the creation of a mobile service is a very important procedure, since “the imagination of telephone scammers is limitless.”
– They use any direction – from healthcare to any kind of payments. This is a very serious fraudulent business, – quotes the words of Shkhagoshev RT. – This service, even when it starts working, will need to be updated constantly. Using modern digital technologies, telephone scammers will come up with various fraudulent schemes every day.
Give a billion
The problem of telephone fraud is aggravated from year to year, and during the pandemic, the activities of swindlers have taken on an unprecedented scale.
In 2020, according to the estimates of BrandMonitor analysts, who analyzed the data of VTsIOM, the attackers earned about 150 billion rubles from telephone deceptions. Almost half of this amount is accounted for by fictitious bank employees. At one time they manage to get an average of about 27 thousand rubles from the cards of the interlocutors. for transactions via ATMs – about 15 thousand rubles.
So, the other day I immediately lost 600 thousand rubles. 61-year-old resident of Orsk. He said that an unknown person called him, who introduced himself as a bank employee, and said: someone is trying to get a loan for you. The victim was asked to take a loan on his own and transfer all funds to a secure account. After following all the instructions, he realized that he had said goodbye to the money.
Often, such call centers are formed in places of deprivation of liberty. To solve this problem, a law was passed in February this year on blocking cellular communications in prisons. In accordance with it, cellular operators must stop serving certain subscriber numbers if they receive appropriate applications from the head of the correctional institution. An attempt to smuggle a telephone into the prison is subject to administrative liability.
Often, citizens themselves make it easier for scammers. According to Maxim Kostikov, head of the Positive Technologies banking systems security research group, leaks of banking information with information about cards and personal data of customers have become more frequent lately. This is facilitated by the use by customers of a phone number or other open data as a login to enter the mobile bank. Criminals also intercept SMS messages, after which they can change the client’s authentication data.
The most ruinous for the Russians are conversations with pseudo-medical experts who, with the help of one call, can lure out more than 50 thousand rubles. For the year, the total amount of financial damage caused to deceived patients amounted to 46.5 billion rubles.
18.6 billion rubles in 2020, phishing sites and non-existent online stores brought scammers. Talking about the criminal schemes of work in this area, information security expert Grigory Pashchenko noted that the main goal of persons posing as employees of online stores is to entice personal data and bank card numbers. Even if the store is real, cybercriminals often manage to obtain information about the order from unscrupulous company employees. He called the most reliable way of safety net an independent call to the store to confirm the order or the method of payment.
Another common way of deception is to introduce yourself as a friend of a relative in a difficult situation.when, due to surging emotions or lulling of alertness, the brain’s ability to analyze is turned off. For example, a telephone swindler, detained the other day in the Irkutsk region, told about how he deceived people. In conversation, he introduced himself as a distant relative or acquaintance of an accidental victim and said that he had difficulties at a gas station. After that, he asked to transfer 2-4 thousand rubles to the gas station employee. Since the amount was not too large, many agreed to help a friend whom they could not remember. Having received the money, he immediately disappeared.