Fraudsters have come up with a new scheme to deceive pensioners with their savings

MOSCOW, September 11 - RIA Novosti. Fraudsters offer older people to apply for a supposedly “state program” with state co-financing and promise to double their pension savings due to this, Anton Nemkin, a member of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy and federal coordinator of the Digital Russia project of the United Russia party, told RIA Novosti.

The RIA Novosti agency, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, launched a special project “Code from SMS” to combat fraudsters and expose cybercriminals acting under foreign influence.

“A new fraud scheme is actively spreading, aimed directly at the pension savings of citizens. Criminals call older people on behalf of supposedly government agencies or financial organizations and offer to sign up for participation in a “state program” that will supposedly allow them to quickly increase their pension savings,” Nemkin said.

According to him, a person is told that he is entitled to government co-financing, offered to “double” savings or urgently transfer funds to a new program, and at the same time, scammers can use the real names of existing government mechanisms, which makes the conversation especially convincing.

“Then, criminals, as a rule, try to obtain personal data, details, codes from SMS or convince a person to perform certain actions in a banking application. In fact, under the guise of consultation about a pension, a person is led to transfer control of his money,” the deputy said.

Nemkin noted that the peculiarity of this scheme is that the attackers play on trust in government institutions and a financial topic in which many older people do not feel confident enough, so the main sign that is worth paying attention to is an unexpected call with an offer to urgently apply for some program or confirm their data.