Now scammers are hunting not just for “gold”, but for bank card data, from which they can steal all the money at once. And their new “golden keys” are secret codes and passwords that will open the treasured doors to the bank accounts of children and their parents.
To gain a child’s trust, scammers use tried and tested schemes.
Create fake pages for online shopping
Many teenagers have their own cards, and children love shopping online no less than adults. Hackers appreciate shopping, but they have their own reasons for this. They use people’s passion for low prices and huge discounts to make money on children and their parents.
Fraudsters create fake online stores of clothes, shoes or gadgets. If you pay for a purchase on them, you can lose all the money on the card.
Before entering personal data, passwords, codes or bank card details anywhere, it is important to make sure that this is not a fraudulent page. Discuss with your child how to distinguish a safe site from a fake one. The article “Phishing: what is it and how to protect yourself from it” will help you with this .
They promise easy money for card transfers
Fraudsters increasingly make teenagers accomplices in their criminal schemes. For example, when scammers steal or swindle money from someone, they try not to show off their accounts. First, they transfer the stolen amounts to schoolchildren’s accounts, and then ask for a reward to cash the money or transfer it to their accomplices. Such intermediate accounts are called dropper accounts, and the intermediaries themselves are called droppers .
Teenagers usually don’t even suspect that they are helping scammers. Often they learn about the dropper scheme as a simple game in which you can make money: the more money you transfer, the more you get. And if you bring friends, you can count on an additional bonus.
Asking for help on behalf of friends on social networks
Cybercriminals hack into social media accounts and then send messages to a friend list on someone else’s behalf. They start a conversation with a banal “how are you?” and almost immediately move on to complaining about life and asking for a loan. Or they say “catch some birthday photos!” and send a malicious virus instead of a link to the photos. It steals personal data, logins, and passwords from personal accounts, including banking ones, from the gadget. There may be more complex scams.
Before doing everything your “friend” asks, it’s best to call him back and check if you really need help. Most likely, he’s not aware of the correspondence. But the sooner he finds out about what happened, the sooner he’ll warn others that his account has been hacked.
Antiviruses, which can be installed on all gadgets, will help protect against malicious links. For the safety of small children, you can also set up parental control programs.
They offer to withdraw money from the Pushkin card
Teenagers aged 14 and over can apply for a Pushkin card for free on Gosuslugi, to which the state credits 5,000 roubles every year. You can use its balance to pay for tickets to theatres, museums, cinemas and concerts. It is impossible to top up the card, transfer or withdraw money from it. You also cannot resell the card itself or the tickets purchased with it – they are personalised.
But the scammers claim that there are ways to transfer funds from a Pushkin card to a regular bank card. They sell some instructions through channels in Telegram or TikTok, in which they promise to tell in detail about different options for withdrawing money. The manual is usually inexpensive – about 100 rubles. Many people don’t mind spending such an amount, but the advice, of course, doesn’t work.
Sometimes scammers promise that they will transfer money from the Pushkin card themselves – for a commission. In this case, the cost of the service can reach up to 50% of the transfer amount. But, having received the advance payment, the scammers disappear.
Some scammers simply offer to buy a Pushkin card from a schoolchild – of course, much cheaper than the face value. But even if the teenager receives payment, he is taking a risk. And no matter what the criminals’ subsequent scheme turns out to be, the child will become their accomplice. And this may result in criminal punishment.
Selling answers to Unified State Exam questions
At the end of the school year, scammers become more active, offering to buy answers to questions of state school exams – OGE and USE. As a rule, they create groups on social networks and Telegram channels.
The scammers claim to have the right answers and promise to send them a few hours before the exam. Students are asked to pay from 1,000 to 20,000 rubles for one or several subjects. But when the teenager transfers the required amount, he receives solutions to last year’s assignments or some random set of answers. Often, the scammers simply disappear.
It is unlikely that anyone would want to admit that they wanted to cheat in order to pass an exam. So the criminals understand that their victims will not even try to return the money