F.A.C.C.T. specialists have identified more than 2,000 phishing sites designed to steal Telegram and WhatsApp accounts. They noticed that the most active period of activity of cybercriminals is the summer months, Mfd.ru informs.

Analysts of the company noted that during the seven months of this year, 1,893 phishing resources were discovered, which were created to steal user accounts on Telegram. The hottest months for such pages to appear were June and July, when 369 and 589 fraudulent sites were detected, respectively.

"In the spring of 2023, analysts began to identify phishing resources designed to steal accounts already in another popular messenger, WhatsApp. In the period from April to July, 171 phishing pages were found, and the peak of activity of criminals was in May (68) and July (74)," they noted.

In such websites, the topic of participation in children's creative contests is often used as a pretext to mislead users. They ask people to vote for a child so that he or she wins a music or dance competition and gets a ticket to summer camp. They create channels with links to phishing sites and scammers add users there themselves. The main theme of phishing pages to steal WhatsApp accounts was children's classical ballet. Users were asked to vote for a girl participating in the contest.

"Cybercriminals don't limit themselves to children's work to steal accounts. From November 2022, F.A.C.C.T. experts detect and block phishing resources every day that require permission to register on various sites through Telegram, to receive bonuses in groups for games, prizes, to receive likes on social networks, personal photos and premium accounts in the messenger," the company said.

Criminals target citizens of different countries: Russia, Italy, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Malaysia.

The head of F.A.C.C.T Ivan Lebedev said that the summer increase in the number of phishing pages, among other things, can be connected with the expansion of partner programs of fraudulent groups and the further development of the automation of the phishing process.

"An additional danger in the matter of stealing user accounts of owners and administrators of Telegram channels is that fraudsters often immediately publish posts about profitable investments in hacked resources, extorting money from subscribers," he said.

The company's experts advise users to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) in messengers, to check domain names of suspicious websites, not to tell anyone or enter anywhere the codes received through SMS or push notifications, card data (PIN and CVV codes), personal data, and never click on suspicious links from strangers.