Surely everyone has a story about how he, his friends or relatives faced phone fraud cases. Someone received a call, someone received SMS, and someone received emails, but the task of each of these messages was for the victim to transfer a certain amount to the fraudster. As a rule, it varies in a small range – from several hundred rubles to several thousand rubles. When a scammer wants to get more, he has to work hard and show an individual approach. Today we will talk about a relatively new scheme to deceive the public, which is similar to spam, but someone might buy it. So the attacker without unnecessary troubles will get some and remain clean.
There are a lot of ways to deceive the population through a smartphone.
How scammers cheat on the phone
I have already talked about the scheme in which a “bank employee” calls you, allegedly from the security service, and says that they tried to withdraw money from your account and even names the amounts and the city in which this happened. A relatively small city is specially taken so as not to fall on its inhabitants. And even if they do, you can always say that it should be. At the same time, the answer “I don’t have so much money on my card” does not work. In response, the “bank employee” says that he sees it, but attempts continue and you need to act.
To prevent the victim from suspecting anything, the caller says that she should contact any bank branch. In this case, he only needs the card number in order to fix the situation. In any case, he will not check it, and even if you tell the card number from your head, he will still say that the complaint about the theft of the card has been fixed.
It seems that this is where the conversation should end and you should go to the bank, but then you are warned that the attackers can somehow get a loan on your card or simply withdraw a little less than they tried, but that's all there is. To do this, the “bank employee” asks if you definitely do not want to issue a blocking by phone. Otherwise, he asks you to say, supposedly on the record, that you relieve him of responsibility for the thefts that will occur while you walk to the bank branch.
It seems that everything looks natural. He even sends you a message, which contains some kind of code that must be dictated to him under the guise of an application code. As I later found out, this code is sent from the bank's website to confirm the loan application. In my case, it was VTB Bank, but this in one form or another is possible in almost any bank. As a result, SMS comes from the bank number and everything looks realistic. At this stage, many are lost, trust the caller and give him any information.
Here we can only recommend one thing – to thank the caller for the information and to call the bank himself. In 99 percent of cases, it turns out that they tried to deceive you, but this is the only way you can protect yourself from fraudsters.
Attackers only want to get your money.
We must give them their due, as the scheme is very beautiful and realistic. Even we at the editorial office, when I received such a call, did not immediately find the catch, although we were initially skeptical about it. But the elderly or simply more gullible people can buy into this, and okay, if you just lose a few thousand rubles from the account, they can get a loan for themselves, and this is much worse.
Only they called me this way twice, but yesterday they showed me a letter in which the scheme was more clumsy, but also more massive. I don't think that any of you will take it, but I want to talk about it.
How scammers cheat people
A key element of this scam is an e-mail, which immediately shows that it is being sent randomly. It's strange that this email doesn't end up in spam. Although, it is possible that this works differently for different services.
The essence of the letter is that its author allegedly hacked your router and gained access to the entire history of browsers on all devices. As he assures, at first he just wanted to block everything and demand a little money for unblocking, but then he noticed which pages you were visiting and changed his mind.
He allegedly noticed that you often watch adult films and not only watch, but also perform certain actions. He captured these actions by activating the camera of the device. In addition, he combined (probably in picture-in-picture mode) the image from the screen and the camera and got “fantastic shots”.
A piece of that very letter.
These shots are the subject of blackmail. If you do not transfer $ 500 to him, he threatens to send it to his entire contact list, which he also took possession of.
The entire absurdity of this method of deception is revealed by the text of the letter itself. Besides the fact that it describes a little unreal things, it is compiled without address. If this is such a cool hacker who can do everything, why does he not know the name of the person he is addressing.
In general, we can say that the scheme is as simple as possible, but if such a letter is received by five million people, and even every hundred thousandth one buys, the fat will already be quite good. Even if every million person transfers $ 500 to the joker, the fat gain will be $ 2,500. Not so bad for an hour of work.
As you can see, there are a lot of deception schemes and they are all different in their realism. To think that you will never be deceived is at least stupid, since even entire military organizations are deceived. The question is how to approach this and how realistic it is to do it. For now, you can simply say that you need to be more careful and tell each other about new schemes of deception, so that no one gets caught and the scammers die out as a class. Although, this is unlikely to ever happen, unfortunately.