Russian experts spoke about the most common fraud schemes on the Internet

One of the trends of the last year, continuing in 2021, was the exploitation of the COVID-19 theme. Denis Legezo, a senior cybersecurity expert at Kaspersky Lab, said that several reports on targeted attacks on research centers dealing with the COVID-19 problem have been published over the past six months.  

One popular type of online fraud is phishing. Last year, Kaspersky Lab found over 7,400 resources. According to experts, scammers are engaged in the distribution of links among Internet users, the addresses of which are difficult to immediately distinguish from the names of real Internet resources. In some cases, the name of the platform is specified correctly, but a word is added to it that should not be in the original, for example, paypal.payments.com instead of paypal.com.

Another common type of fraud is a scam. So, scammers offer users to take a survey or take part in the promotion for a reward. However, users need to pay a small commission, usually about $5. The victims of fraud do not receive any payments, and the commission goes to the scammers.

Denis Legezo noted that ransom attacks will become more frequent.

“Attackers encrypt company data and demand a large ransom, otherwise they promise to put all the data in the public domain,” added he.

In addition, SIM-related attacks are activated. An attacker reissues the SIM card, using fake documents or colluding with an employee of mobile phone stores, inserts it into his phone, and withdraws money from the victim’s account via SMS commands. 

Most often, the victims of fraud are educated people aged 18-42 years with two diplomas and even an academic degree.