Belarus and Russia will act as a single fraud – Newspaper Kommersant No. 68 (7513) of 04/19/2023
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Moscow and Minsk signed agreements on joint actions to regulate communication networks and international traffic. In particular, according to Kommersant, we are talking about the fight against telephone fraud. Now a third of fraudulent calls coming from abroad come to Russia from Belarus, experts say. Collaboration could help solve the problem, but would put additional strain on carriers, they warn.
The Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Communications and Informatization of Belarus will jointly fight fraud (telephone fraud) on their networks, Kommersant was told in the Russian ministry. This is enshrined in one of the international agreements signed on April 18 at the TIBO-2023 ICT forum in Minsk. The second signed document, according to representatives of the Ministry of Digital Development, is a framework one and is dedicated to the “unification of regulatory legal acts in the field of telecommunications” of the allied states.
The ministry assured that the implementation of the anti-fraud agreement would not affect the commercial activities of telecom operators: “It will allow developing an effective system to limit the passage of fraudulent international traffic on the communication networks of the two states.”
MTS, VimpelCom, MegaFon and Tele2 declined to comment. Rostelecom believes that the Russian-Belarusian signing as a whole “is an action aimed at clearing traffic as part of measures to abolish roaming in the Union State.”
At the end of January, a unified phone call verification platform Antifraud was launched in Russia to identify and deal with calls from spoof numbers that are used by fraudsters to deceive subscribers and withdraw money from their accounts. All key Russian operators began to connect to it, now the system controls the traffic that they exchange. Because of the threat of a fine, large market players also began to disconnect small companies that did not connect to the state system from work on their networks (see Kommersant on March 6).
The launch of Antifraud was associated with increased risks in Russia due to fraudulent calls, which intensified by the spring of last year. Only by the end of May 2022, the share of mobile users who received scam calls from unknown numbers reached 12.5% of the total number of subscribers. Experts noted that most of the attackers settled in neighboring states (see Kommersant of June 22).
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Belarus, for its part, at the end of February warned citizens about the spread of fraud in the territory of the republic, based on calls from replacement numbers that look like phones of state institutions, BelTA reported.
In 2022, the number of fraudulent calls in Russia increased by 30%, according to Informzaschita. About 70% of all such calls go through international communication channels, a third of them, according to the company’s estimates, are in Belarus. Kaspersky Lab, however, believes that now a large number of fraudulent calls come from numbers in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Iran.
The head of the Zecurion analytical center, Vladimir Ulyanov, suggests that the results of the work of the Russian Antifraud system “are positive, and in this case, domestic fraudulent traffic is reduced, and attackers continue to look for solutions through foreign calls.” At the same time, Informzaschita warns, for telecom operators, the joint struggle of Russia and Belarus against fraudsters “may entail costs for the implementation and refinement of technical solutions and the modernization of communication systems and equipment.”
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