Fraudsters offered to vote – Kommersant FM
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Attackers are hunting for votes. In recent weeks, an old fraudulent scheme has been scaling up on messengers. Users are written on behalf of friends and relatives with a request to vote for their children in competitions. Those who respond are convinced to follow fake links and enter their phone number. After this, the victims’ accounts are stolen. How do they then use other people’s pages? And what does this threaten? Ivan Khorushevsky sorted it out.
“Hello! Please vote for Sonya, this is the daughter of someone you know. She participates in a competition at a ballet school, where expensive tuition is being raffled off. Voting will be closed very soon, we really need support,” the attackers write to messenger users. Instead of Sonya, there may be Kira, who is not the daughter of acquaintances, but a niece, and is trying to win not an expensive education, but a ticket to the camp. The call for help invariably comes with a link. What will happen if you follow it, scammer victim Anastasia told Kommersant FM:
“I received a message late at night. And for some reason it didn’t arouse any suspicion in me. I clicked on this link and opened the site. And I also thought, he’s kind of stupid, there are very few voices. And in general, it’s nonsense: in order to vote, you need to register your phone number and send a code. I think it’s nonsense, of course, but if it’s necessary, then it’s necessary. That was the end of it. And I conveniently forgot about it exactly until the next morning when my WhatsApp was blocked, and I had a thousand missed calls and even SMS saying that I had been hacked.”
Fraudsters use stolen accounts for new fan mailings to all contacts and public accounts in which the victim was a member. It’s not that difficult to regain access to your account; just write to the messenger support. The application is usually reviewed quite quickly, within a few hours. It is much more difficult to notify about a hack and warn everyone you know about the danger. But it’s still the best case scenario.
Some victims are less fortunate. At a certain stage, attackers begin to attach malicious links to messages, warns Aleksey Lukatsky, Internet security consultant at Positive Technologies:
“If we are forced to click on a link, then our computer or smartphone may be infected, and then there is a chance of losing all information. Attackers can even gain access to online banking or other critical services.”
Fraudsters have been using this scheme for a long time: at first, messages were sent by email and on social networks. In December 2022, mailings were moved to instant messengers. Attackers become more active at night, counting on less vigilance of users. And voting is used as an excuse because Russians are accustomed to competitions on the Internet, notes Pavel Myasoedov, director of the IT-Reserve company:
“We are used to different voting. It’s just that now they are digitized, and people are falling for it. If one of your friends has already suffered from scammers, most likely he is a member of some kind of community. And, accordingly, if you managed to develop a victim within the framework of social engineering, who, in principle, has already been carried out on this topic, then the likelihood is that you can scale it to her friends and relatives.”
It is noteworthy that scammers write to victims, not call them. Perhaps because the voice circuits are losing effectiveness. According to a survey by the Bankiros.ru portal, a third of Russians hang up as soon as they feel something is wrong. Every seventh resident of the country does not answer calls from strangers at all or, on the contrary, starts a conversation with the attackers, but with obscenities.
Everything is clear with us – Telegram channel “Kommersant FM”.
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