UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 3, 2019. Banking scams tend to focus on the customers these days, with losses at RUB 5,000 to RUB 7,00 per customer on average throughout the country; in some cases, however, a lot of money gets stolen, Information Security Director at SKB-Bank Denis Uleyko said at a press conference in Yekaterinburg today.

According to experts, while the Central Bank reports that the number of cyber-attacks the banks get exposed to has been going down, Russian banks still have to deal with them on a weekly basis.

In the year 2018, the overall amount of money stolen from customers through information scams reached RUB 1.4bn all in all, even though 'the majority of Russian banks do implement a multi-level protection system.'

Information Security Director at SKB-Bank Denis Uleyko says there are two principle ways a bank customer can get in trouble: one is when people willingly give out their personal data to scammers and the other is when criminals manipulate a person's bank account and make the transactions themselves (which is the category most frauds fall into).

'Scammers rely on psychological tricks: they can be calling and pestering the potential victim for days on end; according to our records, the longest a scammer has spent on the phone trying to persuade the victim to hand over their personal data was 2.5 hours,' Uleyko says.

Experts say older people are particularly vulnerable, since the younger ones generally read the banks' warnings on their websites and social media accounts more often.

SKB-Bank's Denis Uleyko says the most common patterns are criminally changing a phone number connected to an online banking account and pretending to be a bank employee asking for personal data for 'security reasons' or 'to get a new card issued'.

It is reported the potential victims get targeted by backstreet call centers that use illegally obtained phone number databases to contact bank customers.