New fraud schemes have appeared in Telegram: attackers create "circles" on behalf of birthday people. They hack accounts and record videos asking to transfer money, posing as real birthday people.
After the birthday, the scammer recorded a video message on behalf of the girl who organized the party. He sent it to the victim's friend via messenger. In the video, the friend allegedly asked to transfer 20 thousand rubles to the photographer for the work, since she could not make the payment herself. At the same time, he used compromising portrait and voice of the victim.
The scammer deceived the victim, who began to transfer money. The first two banks rejected the transactions as suspicious. On the third attempt, through another bank, the transfer was successful. After confirming the transfer, the victim opened correspondence with the "birthday girl", but she deleted the messages. The bank told the victim that it was impossible to return the money.
Dmitry Anikin, Head of Data Research Department at Kaspersky Lab, said that attackers use different schemes, but most of them are based on social engineering. For example, after hacking an account, scammers send messages to the victim's contacts. These messages concern not only topics that they could have spied on in previous correspondence, but also include emotional appeals: requests for help or tempting offers. For greater persuasiveness, they use voice and video fakes, known as deepfakes.
In fact, we can say that deepfakes are becoming an additional tool in social engineering when attempting financial theft. In the future, the quality of such fakes will improve, the technologies for creating them will become even more accessible, so it is necessary to be careful when receiving audio and video content in social networks and messengers now
To reduce the risk of cyberattacks, the expert advises to always verify the authenticity of a person in audio, video or photo. Be careful with messages that ask you to transfer money, do not follow links and do not download files from suspicious sources. Use reliable security solutions that will prevent you from going to phishing or fraudulent sites.
In 2025, fraudulent calls in messengers became the main cyber threat to Russians.
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