Maxim Builov on the approaches of scammers to citizens tired of the holidays

VTB drew attention to a sharp drop in customer complaints about fraud in the first days of January after a sharp rise in December. At the same time, the number of applications from citizens fell 4.5 times even compared to January last year.

It may seem that scammers are people too and are relaxing during the New Year holidays. But as Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther said: “Criminals don’t take vacations.” Rather, the point is that citizens, tired of running around the shops in search of gifts for friends and relatives, switch to celebrating with the chimes and simply do not react to scammers’ attempts to communicate. This seasonal decrease in attacks occurs twice a year – in early January and May.

Another thing is that immediately after the New Year holidays, relaxed citizens who are struggling to get into the working rhythm can be taken on a warm note. As the Central Bank reported, in the first days of the first full working week, scammers began actively inviting citizens to resolve issues with their assets blocked by foreign accounting institutions.

Here we can admit that the attackers are following the agenda. Back in November 2023, the President of the Russian Federation signed a decree on the exchange of funds of Russians frozen abroad in the amount of up to 100 thousand rubles. financed by foreign investors. The scheme has not yet worked, but the scammers have already done so. Announcements of readiness to help unfreeze assets, the Central Bank writes, “are widely distributed on the Internet, in social networks and instant messengers, and are sent to users’ email addresses.”

At the same time, the very scheme of taking money from the population would have caused a contemptuous grin from the great schemer and would have been more suitable for Panikovsky or Shura Balaganov. Thus, according to the Central Bank, “to unlock it, you need to transfer to the account of the company that offers the services an amount equal to the value of the frozen assets.” The scammers promise to return the money in double amount.

The scale looks unprecedented. Even in memorial letters about the inheritance of Nigerian princes, the scammers offered to transfer only a small share of the amount “due to the recipient” to pay them fees and bribes to officials there for helping them obtain millions of dollars. And here everything is in advance.

Such an impudent demand, in my opinion, can be explained only by two basic ideas. Or the attackers are counting on the fact that after the holidays the brain activity of the intended victim has not yet begun to recover, the body is poisoned by a hangover and will fall for any conditions. Or that more complex schemes will cause anxiety in the victim and simply will not be able to fit into his head correctly – like Winnie the Pooh, who was only upset by long words. Although, of course, a third option is also possible: that the brains of the scammers themselves are in this state. Anyway, Happy New Year.