INTERVIEW: Bogus callers steal 3.5–5 bln rbl/month from Russians

ST. PETERSBURG, Jun 9 (PRIME) -- Bogus callers steal 3.5–5 billion rubles from Russians’ accounts monthly with an average successful swindling amounting to about 8,000 rubles, Sberbank Deputy Chairman Stanislav Kuznetsov told PRIME in an interview published on Wednesday.

A fraudulent call center makes 3,000 to 7,000 calls a day, and in half of the cases the operators fail to call through with only 1% of the calls working, Kuznetsov said.

The central bank said earlier that the number of attacks on banks’ clients with the use of social engineering methods almost doubled in 2020 and in most of the cases, fraudsters contacted their victims by phone.

“The dark market of personal data, where one can buy all sorts of information about the citizens of the Russian Federation and use it for fraudulent purposes, flourishes in Russia,” Kuznetsov said, adding that Sberbank uncovered 12 floors selling information of financial institutions, mobile operators, and payment systems, while nine floors sell bank cards data.

“It’s worth noting that information from the compromised databases of the external services – delivery of goods, state agencies, and online stores – is available more often,” he said.

At the beginning of 2021, the bank decided to design a special program to fend off phone scamming. “In the first months of its use, the program brought fruit. While the total number of phone fraud in the country did not decrease, they fell for Sberbank clients by more than 30%,” Kuznetsov said.

Sberbank is the most popular target of attacks in Europe and registers about 100 cyberattacks on its financial services daily. “Besides, in January–March, we saw a rapid rise of DDoS attacks on the bank,” the executive said, adding that the trend is clear because of an increasing volume of Internet-connected devices, like cameras, phones, computers and other gadgets.

Kuznetsov said Sberbank is ready to offer state services, including biometry, to Russians. “We have a series of platform solutions and technologies that could accelerate the move of us all toward digital services,” he said.

(72.8256 rubles – U.S. $1)

End