Tatarstan Ministry of Internal Affairs forecasts a growth of hacked personal accounts on Gosuslugi

The electronic service of applying for a loan and an identity card has generated scams by hacking citizens' accounts on the Unified Portal of State and Municipal Services Federal State Information System (Gosuslugi) platform. This type of fraud is growing and will continue to grow, Ramis Gazimov, the deputy head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tatarstan, warned at a briefing yesterday.

He shared his personal experience of communicating with one of the scammers, who, under the pretext of “remote extension of communication services” — a completely unnecessary procedure for the subscriber — tried to convince him to share access codes to his personal account in Gosuslugi, in particular, requested information about his grandfather's name necessary for password recovery. The employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs recorded the conversation in order to record an attempted scam — including for the purpose of training potential victims.

Gazimov shared that quite often such “representatives of a cellular company” achieve their goals and eventually enter someone else's personal account and seize credit funds from someone else. And the damage falls on gullible users.

Among the victims — a worker of the Kazan Vodokanal, who owed 1.5 million after breaking the codes, a resident of Nurlat, for whom a loan of 2 million rubles was issued, and others.

In the overall structure of frauds, this method still occupies only 3.3%, but this is for now.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tatarstan hopes that an effective way to combat such scams will be changes in the legislation on self-prohibition of loans, which will come into force in March 2025. The norm will give any citizen the right to apply to the Credit Bureau that he does not want to take out a loan.

As of February 2024, more than 115 million accounts have been registered on Gosuslugi platform, including 3.5 million individual entrepreneurs and legal entities. In 2023, over 340 million services were provided on the platform, which is by 100 million more than a year ago.

Ramis Gazimov also stated at the briefing that Tatarstan residents transfer an average of 10-15 million rubles to fraudsters every day. In five months, the amount of funds stolen in this way and stolen from bank cards amounted to 2 billion rubles.