OREANDA-NEWS Fraudsters have developed a new scheme to deceive citizens: they write to Russians on behalf of employees of the Central Bank. This is reported by the Izvestia newspaper with reference to the press service of the regulator.

The attackers started creating fake accounts of the heads of regional branches of the Bank of Russia. Pretending to be employees of the regulator, they write to the heads of large companies and government agencies and ask potential victims to help them in detaining scammers in a credit institution. In the course of communication, scammers try to find out confidential information or to extort money.

The press service of the Bank of Russia warned that the regulator's employees do not use messengers or social networks to solve official issues. Russians were urged to remain vigilant and not to disclose personal and financial data to outsiders under any pretext.

VTB analysts previously reported on a new method of fraud — Russians are called through applications for private ads allegedly by potential buyers. The attacker offers the seller to transfer the deposit or immediately pay for his goods, and thus finds out the customer's card number and the name of his bank. After the fraudster "blurts out" the seller and asks him to name the code from the SMS allegedly to confirm the transfer of the deposit.

Kirill Chernov, a car selection expert and author of the AvtoRevizorro YouTube channel, warned that a new way of cheating when buying a car has acquired "cosmic proportions" in Russia. The number of scammers who offer to bring a car to order is now about a quarter of all ads on the network. Most often, they attract a potential victim with low prices — they offer drivers to make an advance payment of five to ten percent, but in the process this amount can increase rapidly.