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- Victim justification: how to sue victims of fraudsters for money from telecom operators
Victim justification: how to sue victims of fraudsters for money from telecom operators
In June alone, telecom operators were fined several times in different regions of Russia for missing fraud calls from fake numbers, despite their existing "Anti-fraud" system. By itself, the introduction of the mechanism has significantly improved the situation with attacks by telephone scammers on Russians, but the quality of protection depends, among other things, on telecommunications companies. And setting up the system is primarily in the interests of the operators themselves, who lose millions of rubles in fines. With the adoption of the Anti-Fraud 2.0 law, companies will most likely have to pay large compensations in favor of fraud victims. Izvestia investigated how the call protection system works against fraudsters and whether the affected Russians can count on payments from operators.
What are cellular operators fined for?
In mid-June, a telecom operator in St. Petersburg was fined almost 2 million rubles at the request of the prosecutor's office for missing phone fraud calls. The case concerned the events of May 2025, when a local resident received three calls from intruders, to whom she eventually transferred 1 million rubles. The prosecutor's office explained the fine by saying that the telecom operator did not verify incoming calls from different subscriber numbers and violated the requirements of the law.
A little earlier, at the request of the prosecutor's office of the Omsk region, the operator was fined 600 thousand rubles. The reason was missing a call from a foreign country with a fake phone number in June 2025. Then the scammers deceived a 19-year-old local resident and stole 40 thousand rubles from her. The prosecutor's office claimed that the mobile operator had the technical ability to stop providing communication services and prevent a crime, but did not do so. A justice of the Peace in Moscow brought the mobile operator to justice under Part 2 of Article 13.2.1 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation ("Failure by a telecom operator to fulfill the obligation to terminate the provision of traffic services to its network").
At the same time, companies are often required to pay compensation to victims of fraudsters. In January, a resident of the Kirovsky district, who lost 103 thousand rubles due to a call from intruders from a fake number, received a payment of 20 thousand rubles from a mobile operator. The company was fined 600 thousand rubles in favor of the state.
Such penalties are not uncommon. Roskomnadzor told Izvestia that in 2025, 132 protocols on administrative offenses were drawn up against operators for missing replacement numbers in communication networks, of which 17 cases are still under consideration. The courts imposed fines on the operators totaling 23 million 50 thousand rubles, and issued 20 warnings.
In 2026, Roskomnadzor has already drawn up 102 protocols, and judges have issued 14 decisions and imposed fines in the amount of 1.5 million rubles.
At the same time, the effectiveness of the Antifraud system is great: it has radically changed the situation with fake calls, their number has decreased significantly, to a minimum, Alla Khrapunova, an expert of the Popular Front, told Izvestia.
How the Antifraud system works
The unified verification platform for telephone calls "Antifraud" is a system of Roskomnadzor and its subordinate Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC). It was launched in 2023, and the largest telecom operators immediately joined it. Roskomnadzor told Izvestia that in 2026, the Antifraud system blocks 1.14 million fraudulent calls per day and 523 million per month.
Ivan Knyazev, a computer incident analyst at UserGate uFactor, explained that "Anti-fraud" is triggered automatically: when the OS1 operator receives a call from the numbered capacity of the OS2 operator, it is checked whether such a call was actually initiated on the OS2 network. If the Anti-fraud IP returns information about the violation, the connection must be terminated.
— But there is an important caveat here: if the violation response is not received within 500 milliseconds, the operator skips the call. This is done so that regular telephone communication does not break down due to delays in the system," the source told Izvestia. — Therefore, some of the omissions may be related not to the lack of "Anti-fraud", but to delays, failures, degradation of services or incorrect data processing.
The effectiveness of the Antifraud system depends on the technical infrastructure of telecom operators, said Sergey Golovanov, chief expert at Kaspersky Lab. The problems may be related to the use of outdated equipment that does not fully support modern number substitution protection mechanisms.
Alexey Postrigailo, senior partner at Ensain IT integrator, explained that the quality of protection depends not only on the very fact of being connected to Antifraud, but also on which solution is used by the operator, how it is configured, how quickly it is updated and carefully it is accompanied.
— Like any software, such a system requires constant improvement, because traffic routes, equipment, rules of interaction between operators and fraud schemes themselves change. In addition, the attackers themselves study the principles of protection, change call routes, use transit through less controlled areas of the network, VoIP infrastructure, foreign sites, split up traffic and select numbers that look plausible to the subscriber. It's a constant race, similar to the fight against VPNs," the expert said.
How scammers break through the "Anti-fraud"
1,162 telecommunications operators are connected to the system, controlling 99.6% of the numbered capacity, explained Sergey Shcherbakov, Technical director of Stakhanovets, an expert in the field of IT and information security. Skips happen where "the percentage falls short of one hundred": some of the operators either did not connect, or did so formally, without completing the traffic control processes. In this case, even a call that can technically be blocked goes through. According to Roskomnadzor, 100% of telephone operators are connected to the Antifraud system.
Ivan Knyazev added that small VoIP providers and some small telecom operators remain problematic, where the risk of incorrect routing, response delays or incorrect data processing in the system is higher. Because of this, individual calls may not be validated as they should.
— Antifraud copes with the substitution of numbering within the Russian Federation, but does not close all fraudulent scenarios. That leaves foreign traffic, VoIP, small operators, and social engineering. In addition, Antifraud does not solve the problem of calls and messages inside messengers," the specialist clarified.
In turn, Sergey Shcherbakov drew attention to the fact that in cases of operator fines, cases most often involve cases where international transit traffic is used to bypass: the call enters the network through a foreign gateway, but is displayed as a Russian number. According to him, this also happened in the case of the Omsk region.
"Calls can also leak during mass automated calls, which fraudsters adjust to the thresholds of the operators' internal antispam algorithms," said the source.
At the same time, the number of hybrid schemes is growing, when the first contact with the victim is through a messenger, and the phone is used as the second stage of the attack, added Sergey Polunin, head of the IT infrastructure solutions protection group at Gazinformservice.
Is the telecom operator always to blame
Formally, as Sergey Shcherbakov noted, in most cases, it is the telecom operator who is guilty of breaking through the "Anti-fraud". The obligation to terminate a call from a replacement number has been established by federal law No. 386-FZ since 2017, and responsibility for this has been in place since 2021, when the Anti—fraud system was not yet launched.
— Another thing is that skipping a call is just one link in the chain that leads to financial losses. The outcome also depends on the bank's anti-fraud systems on the transaction side and the person's alertness," the expert explained. — So the law quite rightly imposes on the operator the obligation to prevent the call itself, but to call him the sole culprit of the final damage would be an oversimplification.
However, not every call from a fraudster is due to the fault of the operator due to a malfunction of its "Anti-fraud" systems. Alla Khrapunova also noted that fraudsters often use skipping calls through SIM boxes and "there is still a lot of work to do" with this problem.
Izvestia sent inquiries to the largest Russian telecom operators. No responses had been received at the time of publication.
Is it possible to sue money from the operator
The administrative fines that courts impose on telecom operators due to missing calls to replacement numbers go exclusively to the federal budget of the Russian Federation, and not to the affected citizens, said Evgeny Kostromin, lawyer and founder of the ContractCreation by Kostromin legal boutique. This is a punishment from the state.
"But the very fact of this fine is the main trump card for the victim in court to recover from the operator the amount of stolen money and moral damage already in his pocket," the expert said.
In this area, the editorial office's interlocutor is witnessing a kind of "legal dawn." However, the proportion of court refunds is still small: according to expert estimates, no more than 15-20% of the total number of incidents involving fake numbers (almost all of them initiated by the prosecutor's office in defense of vulnerable segments of the population). At the same time, victims often rely not on administrative fines, but on criminal cases that are initiated in parallel in cases of embezzlement, but have been investigated for years.
The situation will radically change with the entry into force of the Anti-Fraud 2.0 law in 2027, the expert expects. The package of amendments has already been adopted by the State Duma in June 2026.
— As soon as these regulations become fully operational, the victims will be able to demand from the operators the full refund of the stolen amounts through the court. It will be financially more profitable for telecom companies to set up security perfectly than to pay substantial amounts of compensation," the lawyer explained.
The Anti-Fraud 2.0 law prescribes a mechanism for compensating victims of fraud. Previously, victims could only file claims with the bank, now the telecom operator will also be responsible if he has not taken sufficient measures to protect the person. The compensation rules will come into force in March 2027, and they will apply only to those who are deceived after that date.
Therefore, first of all, smartphone users themselves should be on their guard. Sergey Golovanov recommended that you install an additional layer of protection — applications to detect unwanted calls. But the most important thing is the attentiveness of the user himself.
— No matter which number the call came from, you should not tell the other person the SMS codes, passwords, bank card details and other confidential information. If the caller introduces himself as an employee of a financial institution, government agency, or telecom operator, requiring urgent action, you should call the official number yourself and clarify the information," the expert concluded.
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