F.A.C.C.T.: Hackers steal Russians' money via smartphone NFC modules

Hackers have begun to actively steal money from Russians using the NFCGate application. This was reported on January 22 by F.A.C.C.T., a company specializing in cybersecurity.

The application was created in 2015 as a training project of German students. According to the company, NFCGate was first used for fraudulent purposes in November 2023. At the same time, the first successful attacks were recorded in August 2024.

"F.A.C.C.T. experts. Fraud Protection estimated the total amount of damage for leading Russian banks from the new fraudulent scheme at 40 million rubles. In December 2024 and January 2025, at least 400 attacks on customers of leading Russian banks were recorded, the average amount of debit amounted to about 100 thousand rubles," - stated in the publication on the website.

Experts note that cases of attacks may increase by 25-30% per month. Further growth of such fraud is due to the high prevalence of devices with NFC-sensor and a simple cybercrime scheme.

For security purposes, F.A.C.C.T. urges to install applications only from official stores, not to share personal information with outsiders, to check suspicious installation offers, and to immediately block bank cards in case of suspected compromise, "Gazeta.Ru" specifies.

Banks the company urged to strengthen anti-fraud systems, to analyze the geolocation of users, as well as to take into account the data of the ATM network and tokenization.

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Attackers pretending to be debt collectors and bailiffs

Earlier in the day in the center of digital expertise Roskachevo shared ways to recognize fake banking applications. It is specified that in case of installation of an unofficial application, users must enter confidential data, including CVV-code, which further leads to theft of information and loss of access. In addition, signs of fakes are a small number of negative reviews, mistakes in the name or addition of a word, as well as spelling and punctuation errors in the description.