"Prison banks" stole 1.6 billion rubles from Russians

According to the Bank of Russia, in the third quarter, 180 thousand transactions totaling 2.5 billion rubles took place without the consent of customers. This is a third more than in the same period last year.

"64% of thefts (worth 1.6 billion rubles) took place using social engineering methods - that is, through calls from fraudulent call centers that operate in the prisons of the FSIN system," notes finanz.ru .

In a year, scammers doubled the number of phone numbers from which fraudulent calls are received. If in the third quarter of 2019 banks identified 5.2 thousand SIM cards of fraudsters, then this year there were already 10.7 thousand.

Increasingly, criminal call centers are using phone numbers disguised as legal federal companies. The Central Bank calculated that the number of calls coming from numbers starting with 8800 increased by 245% compared to the second quarter of this year, and by 358% compared to last year. In total, scammers have called the Russians 15 million times: cybercrime is developing at lightning speed. At the same time, no more than 13% of the stolen funds can be returned to the victims. According to the Central Bank, telephone scammers call citizens from every third institution of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia.

Experts are convinced that it is impossible to make calls to citizens from FSIN institutions so that it is invisible to law enforcement officers, since this activity requires the installation of professional equipment. 15 million calls are impossible to make from under the blanket in the cell, especially given the fact that most scammers call customers during business hours, and not at night.

Experts believe that the existence of such a system is possible only if the criminal communities include officials of the Federal Penitentiary Service, who not only observe what is happening, but also lead the work of criminal schemes.

According to Olga Romanova , head of the Rus Sitting Foundation, in Sberbank alone, in the first half of 2020, about 2.9 million customer requests were recorded about attempts to deceive, which is twice as much as in the whole of 2019.

“And these are only those who have converted. And that's just Sberbank. But they are calling from Alpha, VTB, and Otkrytie. Sber believes that there is a call center in every third institution of the penal system in Russia. I would say that this is by the most conservative estimates. According to the observations of "Russia Sitting" - in half, if not more, "she said.

“Perhaps the law enforcement system simply turns a blind eye to such crimes because of a direct interest in such activities? - says Mikhail Fatkin, partner of FMG Group. "After all, to paraphrase Vladimir Putin: they would like to catch, they would have caught."

To combat prison call centers, the Federal Penitentiary Service offered to buy "jammers" worth about 3 billion rubles, but experts are convinced that such a measure would be like "the fight of bees against honey."