Fraudsters Scammed Russians Out of 150 Billion Rubles in 2020

In 2020, Russian citizens lost approximately 150 billion rubles to phone and online scammers, according to research by BrandMonitor. Of this amount, 66 billion rubles were taken by criminals posing as bank employees.

BrandMonitor based their estimates on data from the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM). The most costly scams involved fake medical workers, who managed to extract more than 50,000 rubles from a single victim on average.

As mentioned above, scammers pretending to be financial institution employees stole 66 billion rubles from Russians. In these schemes, victims were tricked into withdrawing money from ATMs. Slightly less—46.5 billion rubles—was lost to fraudsters offering fake medical services, while 18.6 billion rubles went to operators of phishing websites and counterfeit online stores.

While fake medical workers could swindle over 50,000 rubles from one person, fake bank employees typically took less—an average of 27,000 rubles, and even less (15,000 rubles) when the scam involved ATM withdrawals.

Cybersecurity experts believe that the figures provided by BrandMonitor do not reflect the full scale of the problem. For example, Sergey Golovanov from Kaspersky, quoted by Kommersant, is convinced that the real financial losses could amount to tens of billions of rubles more. This is because not every victim reports the incident to law enforcement.

Source

BrandMonitor, Kommersant