In St. Petersburg, fraudsters promise to protect “State Services”, and leave with a nose

Attackers call Petersburgers and introduce themselves as employees of the service organization. They ask for a code from an SMS, and then convince that the account on the “State Services” was hacked and it needs to be “protected”. This was warned in the press service of the Office for Combating the Illegal Use of Information and Communication Technologies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia in St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region.

That's how it works. A person calls allegedly a representative of a management company or other service organization. Under the pretext of replacing intercom keys or issuing a pass to the entrance, the fraudster asks to dictate the code from the SMS. As soon as the victim does this, she receives a message about suspicious activity in the account on Public Services. They also offer to urgently contact the “support service”.

During the conversation, the attackers assure that the account is hacked, and try to extract additional personal data. Their goal is to scare the person and force them to pass information to access their accounts.

In order not to get caught, experts advise never to call anyone codes from SMS, even if the caller is an employee of the management company or government agency. Do not call back the numbers from suspicious messages. You need to check the security of the account only through the official portal "Public Services". If there is a suspicion of hacking, it is better to immediately change the password and check the active sessions.