Russian banks to launch a system against telephone fraud

Financial organizations are planning to launch a pilot project of a system for accounting and analyzing telephone fraud, said Alexey Voilukov, vice president of the Association of Banks of Russia. The service will allow to monitor calls, identify unscrupulous operators and more effectively track the fraudsters.

The Association will present the developments to the regulatory agencies along with proposals for changing the legislation. In order to improve the response to criminal attacks, the project should be implemented on the basis of the site of the supervisory authority, for example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Experts believe that the owner of such a system should be one of the government agencies, authorized to request information from operators about the sources of traffic and to process data containing the secrecy of communications.

“It is necessary to tighten legislation in the field of personal data protection and tighten control over bank employees since fraudsters often obtain information about customers through leaks,” added experts.

Tinkoff Bank believes that it will take about a month to test the project after the creation of an interdepartmental anti-fraud group. The bank will become one of the pilot’s participants.

Other major credit organizations also supported the idea of implementing the system. The pilot of the project can start as early as the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022. However, full work will require changes in the law.

According to Tinkoff, the number of malicious calls in the first quarter of 2021 increased 2.3 times compared to the same period in 2020. In addition, about 80% of phone scammers use number spoofing, so after launching the project of the system of accounting and analysis of telephone fraud, it will be much more difficult for them to carry out attacks.