Bank Cyber-Robberies on the Rise in Russia: Report

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An increase in online theft that saw 6.4 billion rubles ($100.37 million) stolen from private and corporate bank accounts, a Bank of Russia report published on Wednesday shows, according to Amur Media.

The central bank said it had recorded more than half a million unauthorized operations across bank accounts in the country last year, the report said.

The bank did not provide statistics from 2018 that could have shown how significant the increase in cyber theft was last year.

The report notes that 69% of operations that were performed without the consent of customers were carried out using social engineering methods, where fraudsters, introducing themselves, for example, as bank employees, gained access to money on Russian cards.

The central bank says that a year earlier the share of such operations reached 97%.

The regulator doesn’t say which methods accounted for the remaining 31% of theft from the cards of Russians, and the document indicates only “other methods”.

The regulator notes that the scammers managed to make the least profit through the terminals, about 500 million rubles were still stolen from ATMs. And about 3 billion rubles “leaked” into the pocket of cybercriminals through Internet resources.