Crimean police report a new type of remote fraud — “Vote for your niece, please”

CrimeaPRESS reports:

In just one day, police officers in Crimea registered 6 cases of remote fraud using the “Vote for your niece, please” scheme.

The deception scheme faced by the residents of the peninsula is as follows. Unsuspecting instant messenger users receive messages from friends with the same text:

Hello! I apologize for interrupting. Can you vote for (NAME) here, please? This is my niece. They have a competition at their ballet school, and a ticket to a children’s camp is at stake. There are a few votes short of victory.

After the text there is a link to a supposed voting site. However, as soon as the messenger user clicks on the attached link, he gives the unknown person access to his account.

Citizens do not notice anything suspicious in a friend’s request for help, but after you respond to the messages, your personal data falls into the hands of criminals. Then the scammers use your phone book data and send out requests on behalf of the hacked subscriber to borrow a certain amount of money. Thus, over the past 24 hours, scammers have defrauded gullible citizens of more than 180 thousand rubles.— said the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Crimea.

Crimean police officers urge citizens to be vigilant!

To protect yourself from criminal attacks by scammers, you need to remember simple rules:

• Do not click on unfamiliar links, even if you receive a message from a friend. It’s better to call back the subscriber from whom you received the SMS and check with him for information.
• In the settings of your messengers, you can set two-factor authentication. This will help you, if you follow an unknown link, to avoid hacking by third parties of your messengers and stealing personal data, since the code for logging into your accounts is sent to your mobile number, to which the attacker does not have access.
• If you followed an unknown link, check the “linked devices” section. Having discovered an unknown device, you need to “untie it” — this will help block attackers’ access to your personal data.

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