MOSCOW, December 23 Telephone scammers become more active on the eve of the New Year, for example, they call under the guise of mobile operators and offer to renew the SIM card contract, and also create copies of a person’s account in the messenger and extort money from his acquaintances, said Andrey Biychuk, director of the “Defender” product from MTS.
He noted that another method is now being used — a person is called through a messenger, setting the name of law enforcement agencies or the logo of a large commercial organization on his avatar, and during the dialogue they are asked to turn on the screen broadcast in order to see the one-time passwords that the victim receives.
“Another current scheme today sounds like this: “The contract of your SIM card is ending, you need to urgently renew it, otherwise the phone will not work.” The purpose of such calls is to obtain passwords from State Services, a bank, and so on. The mobile operator will never ask for passwords, in case of such calls you need to reset the call and call back yourself or write to the operator’s support chat,” Biychuk said.
In addition, according to him, patterns of personal attacks, which are preceded by reconnaissance of the victim, have become more frequent. Thus, attackers create a copy of a person’s account in the messenger, study their immediate circle of friends and begin writing on their behalf in order to get money under various urgent pretexts. For greater authenticity, they call the user himself and record his voice, so that later, using AI technologies, speech synthesis and noise, they can send an audio message to the victim’s friends.
In order to protect yourself, the expert advises setting up settings in messengers so that only contacts can call, using caller ID, and also rejecting all calls where they confidently ask for something, limit the time for making a decision, and intimidate. “Remember that operators and law enforcement agencies never ask for data and passwords,” the expert concluded.