Russians warned of a wave of fraud due to payment restrictions in games

Restrictions on payments for Russian applications and games in Google Play will provoke a new wave of fraud. Users may start receiving messages with phishing payment links en masse, RuStore security director Dmitry Morev told Izvestia on December 14.

"Fraudsters may start sending users messages on behalf of the studio via social networks or messengers asking them to urgently pay for a subscription to the service using the offered link, while access to Google Play is not yet blocked. If a user uses a phishing link to pay, he risks not only losing his money, but also passing his personal data to hackers," said Morev.

According to him, criminals can also create various groups and chatbots in social networks and messengers to pay for subscriptions. After payment in this way, the user will either be blocked, or in the worst case the user will lose his money.

"If you have decided on such a method of payment, it is necessary to carefully double-check all the links and all the sources through which the payment will pass. It is almost impossible to detect fraudsters in such a situation. The only way not to become a victim of malicious hackers is to use verified resources to pay for applications," added Morev.

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Teenagers and retirees are often drawn into "covert operations"

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 through 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.