“My baby is dying”: scammers activated with the help of the “accident” ploy

“I saw a post of my friend in one of the social networks, and I felt sick,” Muscovite Julia told MK. – I know her 3-year-old son Adam very well, and Milan wrote in this post that he was hit by a car and is dying in intensive care! And there she asked for money for some kind of plate for him, because he had a traumatic brain injury … My tears flowed in hail, and I decided to call her, although I was very scared: I didn’t know what words to find for mother, who has such grief!

After Julia called her friend, it turned out that Milana’s mail and account had been hacked, and the baby, thank God, is alive and well.

But many friends have already managed to transfer money to the card indicated in the post. Indeed, in the “cry of despair” of the mother, it was indicated that there were “5-6 hours” left, and the child would die.

“Please listen! Today, October 28, a terrible grief happened!!! My son was hit by a car while he was crossing the road. This bastard driver knocked him down at full speed and practically left no chance for life … Adam is in intensive care with a severe open head injury. The operation is free, but you need money for a plate (cranioplasty). We have collected 1,560,000 rubles, but we still lack 1,250,000 rubles. As much as we can, we will give everything.”

“They hacked my email,” Milana told MK. – I received a notification of “suspicious activity” that someone accessed my mail from such and such a device. But they hacked, it turns out, even before this message arrived. Because they already managed to clean everything up and download the documents that were there.

While Milana was changing her password at the post office, the villains managed to log into her account on the social network (since it is registered via mail) and change the password, e-mail and phone number in it. And post about the accident and fundraising. At the same time, they not only posted a post, but also wrote to all her friends in a personal message about “what happened”.

Along with the post, the criminals posted the child’s birth certificate, his SNILS, and even attached a fake medical statement from the hospital about the injury.

– I had documents in the mail – I sent them for a visa, for study. Passports, policies … And I didn’t clean anything up, I didn’t even have such a thought that they could be hacked, ”says Milana. – I think that the scammers managed to make good money, several people managed to transfer money to them. Many acquaintances called me in tears, and then rejoiced when they found out that everything was fine with their son …

The girl tried to restore access to her account on the social network, but she still has not been able to do this. After all, another phone, indicated by the attackers, is now tied to it. And therefore, that post is still hanging, it was not blocked, although she and her friends wrote complaints to the administration of the social network.

The victim wrote statements to the police and to the bank whose details were indicated by the scammers.

For clarifications on how to secure their mail and account, MK turned to an expert in the field of Internet crime investigations.

“Email, any social network account must be protected using a two-factor identification system,” warns Igor Bederov, chairman of the Council for Combating Technological Offenses. – This system should at least be implemented on the basis of receiving an SMS message about entering this account and sending a password for verification.

But this is also not very reliable today. The most reliable is the use of individual password generators for each account (Yandex, Google, VKontakte have their own passwords).

In this case, the password should not be stored in your browser. Because if it is stored there, then the attacker will send you, as was the case in this case, a stealer (viral software) that will steal your authorization sessions, as a result of which your accounts will get to the fraudster.

Passwords must be stored in a special password manager, from which it is very difficult to steal (an application that is installed on a computer and later allows you to easily and easily access any site, saving the password, but the password will not be in the browser).

Second. If this nevertheless happened, you were hacked, then the first thing to do is write to the postal administration and the administration of the social network. They have all of your access logins and are able to distinguish between a standard login from your regular device and an attacker’s login. It will be a completely different device, and before the trial, in theory, the account should be frozen.

And third: how to distinguish fake posts? This is probably the simplest. How many people have you met who ask for money like this? Usually scammers indicate a card that has nothing to do with the victim, and when transferring money, the name, patronymic and surname of the person receiving the money will not be partially displayed, as was the case in this case – the bank indicated there does not do this.

As for the specially used words for the text of such fraudulent ads, I think that they use well-known psychological tricks: squeeze a tear out of a person so that a person does not have time to think, and he immediately rushed to help. It is easier to contact a person, find out what happened, before transferring some money to him.

And here is another fresh example, which was reported on November 2 by the Vladivostok police. True, here the scammers acted through a phone call. “Baba, I had an accident, I ran through a red light, I had an operation and I can’t speak.” A 73-year-old resident of Vladivostok, having heard such words on the phone, immediately agreed to help her granddaughter financially. As she later told the police, it seemed to her that the voice on the receiver sounded like her granddaughter. Money, as the “lawyer” to whom the false granddaughter handed over the phone, told the grandmother, it took as much as 1.8 million rubles.