The expert told how scammers fake “circles” in Telegram

MOSCOW, March 6Fraudsters began to fake “circles” — video messages on Telegram in order to defraud money — this is another way to gain the trust of the victim, said a leading specialist in the Digital Risk Protection department of F.A.C.C.T. Evgeny Egorov.
“Scammers have been using theft of telegram accounts and fake mailings asking to borrow money for quite a long time, so at the beginning of the year they added audio messages with the voice of the real owner, both taken from correspondence and generated using neural networks, and now — generated “circles” “… For scammers, such a Telegram “circle” is another way to gain the trust of the victim by supporting the correspondence with an image of the real owner of the account,” Egorov said.

The expert said that you don’t need to have any special knowledge to create fake video messages. Now there are dozens of tools for generating video and audio deepfakes — for this you need a photo of the face of the real owner of the Telegram account.

The head of the Positive Technologies research group, Irina Zinovkina, said in a conversation with the agency that the number of frauds using deepfakes is increasing every year. Not only ordinary users are attacked, but also individual organizations — in particular, specific employees are attacked with the intention of forcing them to take a certain action. In her opinion, the number of such attacks will only increase.
«Any emerging technology poses a threat to cybersecurity, and deepfakes are no exception. New risks will appear, but it is worth understanding that along with this there will be ways to reduce these risks,» Zinovkina noted.
Experts have given several recommendations that will help you avoid falling for the tricks of scammers. To begin with, you need to protect your account in the messenger and set up two-factor authentication, do not follow suspicious links and do not distribute information about yourself. It is important to adhere to the principle of “zero” trust — not to believe everything you receive via the Internet. As for video messages, you can try to determine their authenticity using such signs as, for example, unnatural facial expressions, strange blinking of the eyes.

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