Online banks that want to steal your data and money from your account

Since the spring of 2020, there has been a sharp increase in phishing attacks that target American bank customers. In July alone there were discovered more than 300 fake pages, allegedly belonging to credit organizations. These pseudosites appear in search engines and actively advertise themselves online. The experts at Roskatchestvo Digital Expertise Center tell about the consequences of encountering such sites and explain how to protect yourself from this type of fraud.

These phishing sites accurately imitate the login pages of a personal bank account variant: an offer to take a survey on behalf of the bank promising a prize . As a rule, after entering a login and password, scammers offer the user to download a browser plugin to speed up or improve the service, under the guise of which a Trojan is delivered to the user, stealing his personal and payment data.

It also often happens that after you pay by card on a phishing site you get a message that the payment has failed. The victim of fraud tries to pay repeatedly, and in the end the money is deducted for all the attempts. A person who accidentally used such a site instead of the real one risks to lose money on his card, infect all his devices with a virus and become an object of constant bombardment by ads and fraudulent offers. Therefore, it is better to “shoot off on the fly” phishing pages, recognizing the obvious signs of cheating.

Following these simple rules from the Roskatchestvo Digital Expertise Center will help you not to fall victim to fraudsters:

Try to use the application on your cell phone instead of accessing the mobile bank from the browser your phone should have anti-virus software that needs to be regularly updated and files checked . Using the desktop version of mobile banking through the browser on your phone instead of the app is not recommended.

● If you use Dexton browser to access the online bank on your PC or laptop, make sure that you regularly check your computer with an antivirus.

Remember and type the address of the online bank in your browser every time instead of searching and selecting the result from the search box. This minimizes the risk of following a phishing link in the search results. Saving a bookmark in your browser with the current address of the bank is also not completely secure.k. Certain viruses are capable of spoofing the links in your favorites.

If you use a link from the search engine to go to the bank’s page, pay close attention to the address bar: as a rule scammers copy the page address but put it in an exotic domain zone such as .cf or .icu. Another frequent variant is when cheaters add one or more symbols to the official bank domain and supposedly service prefixes like “online”, “cabinet”, “vhod” and “login”.

Sberbank Online the most frequently spoofed site, along with VTB requires only a login, a personal password or a one-time code from an SMS. If you are asked for any other personal or payment information on the website, such as a bank card number or cell phone number, leave the site and contact the bank’s technical support.

Signs of fraud can usually be found on the phishing site itself: sloppy design, new unfamiliar forms for example, for entering a code from a text message immediately on the main page , broken links to sections copied from the official page wrong phone numbers, and so on.

● Follow basic safety rules when using mobile banking: don’t access your personal account from public Wi-Fi don’t give your online banking passwords to anyone make sure the address bar starts with the prefix p>

Follow basic rules against phishing: do not click on links in emails and messengers from unknown senders, do not open attached files. The offer of a very good deal should not intrigue you, but alert you. Make sure that anti-virus software is always on and updated to the latest version, as this will provide an extra layer of protection. Never give out your payment information to anyone.

Always pay attention to the amount in a text message with a code from the bank.

“The main way to protect yourself from online scams is to be extremely careful online and make every move consciously. Anything done quickly, on the fly, already carries a potential threat, because you have no control over your actions and can accidentally install malware on your device or give your data to the wrong hands,” summarized Anton Kukanov, head of the Roskatchestvo Digital Expertise Center.