Lawyer told about the ability of fraudsters to issue loans by SNILS number

If fraudsters get a victim's SNILS number, they can easily gain access to his/her account on the "Gosusgoservices" portal or arrange a micro-loan. Lawyer David Adams, general director of the AID Professional Legal Group, said on December 15.

"The first and most obvious goal of fraudsters is to access an account on the "Gosuservices" portal. If they know your SNILS, it makes it much easier to restore or hack the account," Adams told Gazeta.Ru.

He noted that access to "Gosuslugi" will allow fraudsters to find out passport data, registration address, tax information and information about a person's property. With this data, attackers can try to issue subsidies or apply for state payments on behalf of the victim, change his registration data, and all this will create real difficulties for the true owner of the account.

"In addition, SNILS can be used to register e-wallets or accounts in financial services. This allows fraudsters to cover their tracks when conducting illegal transactions," the lawyer explained.

In particular, criminals try to disguise their money transfers, purchase of goods prohibited by law or money laundering. Moreover, accounts that are registered to someone else's data are highly valued by criminals because they give them the anonymity they need.

Microfinance organizations, as Adams pointed out, often limit themselves to a minimum amount of information about a client to identify them, and among that data can be, among other things, a SNILS number. Combined with a full name and a copy of a passport, it can help an attacker "confirm" his identity and arrange a microloan for the victim, who will then face debts and a damaged credit history.

In addition, the SNILS number can tell the fraudster about the approximate level of income of the victim, because it can be used to find out the size of pension contributions by requesting information from the pension fund. Adams emphasized that a compromised SNILS number poses a threat in combination with other available data, and reminded that one should not give such information to any stranger, no matter who they present themselves as.

Without leaving the room: scammers take out loans using data from leaked databases

How to protect yourself from such situations

On December 8, Sarkis Shmavonyan, manager for work with educational organizations at Cyberprotect, told Izvestia that it is important to understand that almost every citizen's data has already been compromised - this follows from an analysis of databases that have leaked to the Web. Often fraudsters use such data when communicating with the victim to induce trust. Faced with such attackers, you can not follow the links they send, call codes from SMS. It is important to regularly change passwords for accounts and not use the same login information.