Sberbank says clients’ complaints on phone fraud spikes 1500%

MOSCOW, Dec 6 (PRIME) -- Russian top lender Sberbank has registered a 1500% rise in clients’ complaints of fraudsters’ calls in the recent two years, and 2.5 million complaints in 2019, Sergei Veligodsky, head of the bank’s anti-fraud department, said on Friday at the Antifraud Russia forum.

“A new trend, calls on behalf of a security service, appeared in 2019. We had 160,000 client complaints about such calls in 2017 and registered almost 2.5 million this year. We should keep in mind that it’s only the clients who complained to the bank and there are many more who did not,” Veligodsky said.

There are new challenges for banks in 2019. “First, it’s calls with a replaced phone number, anonymizers, or call-centers that are located both in Russia and on the territories of the nearest states, it’s call forwarding to clients’ numbers and remote control, which perpetrators install on a victim’s phone,” the expert said.

Sberbank has registered 170,000 unique phone fraudsters in 2019, he said.

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