Wildberries warned of a new Telegram scam on behalf of marketplaces

The security team of the united company Wildberries & Russ has recorded a significant increase in the popularity of a new fraud scheme - fake drawings of gift certificates in Telegram. The number of detected cases increased by 90% compared to the previous month, the online store told Izvestia.

They noted that under the pretext of receiving certificates for a certain amount of money from marketplaces, attackers in messenger offer to follow a link and take their "winnings". In order to make potential victims more trustworthy, the scammers use the branding of marketplaces in their communications.

In most cases, after clicking on the link, the victim opens a Telegram bot that provides instructions on how to get the "winnings". In order to receive a gift, it is often necessary to first complete a task - for example, register on a bookmaker's service or "pay for access to analytics". After that, the victim gets the opportunity to participate in a drawing for a "gift certificate". Then the bot offers tasks to earn money. As a result, the scammers gradually collect user data, including bank details and information for entering the personal account of the marketplace, with the help of surveys.

The security team of the united company reminded that the marketplace does not conduct such promotions, and participation in such tasks is dangerous and can lead to significant damage to the user. Genuine gift certificates are only sold on the official website.

Ivan Vorobyev, the head of counteraction to fraud FinTech Wildberries & Russ, specified that the company implements artificial intelligence technologies that allow to identify illegal actions, thanks to which over the last period it was possible to prevent more than 2,000 attempts to deceive customers and saved more than 10 million rubles.

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Earlier, on November 17, Evgeny Pankov, project manager of the .RU/.RF domain coordination center, told Izvestia that there is a steady increase in phishing attacks conducted via messengers, especially Telegram and WhatsApp (owned by Meta, whose activities are banned in Russia). According to him, 2,374 domains imitating Telegram were blocked in Runet in the first 10 months of this year, which is 2.2 times higher than the same period last year. For the second messenger, the number of blocked domains increased more than five times - from 205 to 1,036.