The number of fraudulent resources has increased by 1.5 times on Telegram

In the first quarter of 2024, the number of phishing resources in Telegram increased by 1.5 times in Russia compared to the same period last year. The Russian Izvestia newspaper informs about this, referring to the senior content analyst of Kaspersky Laboratory Olga Svistunova.

According to her, phishers often change their legends, but they always have one goal: to lure potential victims and direct them to fake Telegram authentication pages so that they enter their phone number and verification code, after which this data is already at the hands of fraudsters.

Svistunova said that at different times they encountered various legends invented by attackers, for example, an offer to participate in a survey, access to "adult channels", access to other users' correspondence, the opportunity to earn game currency, testing a Telegram Premium subscription, etc.

The press service of the Solar group of companies told the newspaper that experts from its Solar AURA external digital threat monitoring center recently discovered a large-scale network of malicious websites with images designed to steal Telegram accounts. They can easily be found in search results.

"When trying to access the site with the source code and download the image, the user is redirected to one of the phishing resources impersonating the Telegram community page," the press service said, adding that if the user enters his account login information there, the attackers immediately receive them.

Irina Zinovkina, head of Positive Technologies research group, told Izvestia about new methods of stealing user accounts. They include fake accounts and fake voicemails generated by using AI. Telegram has become popular not only for personal communication, but also has social networking functions, which increases the number of attacks on its users, the expert explained, noting that the increase in fraud is related to the increase in the number of users.