The information that appeared in the media that telephone scammers began to call Russians more often from foreign numbers has not yet been confirmed by specialists. This was stated in a comment to Izvestia on February 17 by the head of the information and analytical research department at T.Hunter, Igor Bederov.
“I have no information that scammers have begun to call more often from foreign numbers. On the contrary, I state that SIM-banks are massively installed in Russia, through which criminals call. This, as well as the use of drops, legal entities and acquiring on the territory of Russia and its allies to receive money from victims, indicates a sharply negative trend in the cybercriminalization of the population,” Bederov said.
Earlier February 17 newspaper “Kommersant” reported that telephone scammers terrorizing Russians began to change mobile phone numbers to international ones. According to telecom operators, at the beginning of 2023, the most unreliable calls came from numbers using the codes of Japan, Korea, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Liechtenstein. Experts believe this phenomenon is a consequence of the protection of domestic traffic.
On the same day, at the Ural forum “Cybersecurity in Finance”, the head of the department for organizing the fight against the illegal use of information and communication technologies, police colonel Philip Nemov, said that the record amount stolen by telephone scammers from a Russian was 500 million rubles. According to him, scammers can keep people “on the wire” for one to two weeks.
A day earlier, the Bank of Russia noted that in 2022, 13.4 billion rubles were stolen from Russians using fraudulent schemes. The average amount of one such transaction increased by almost a third. Among the frequent schemes are calls from “banks”, “power structures”, “help with obtaining benefits”, requests for help from “relatives in trouble”.
