Pseudo-volunteers stole 200 million from Ukrainians' cards

Losses from illegal actions and fraudulent transactions with payment cards have increased by 46 per cent to UAH 481m, the National Bank has reported.

The data was made public during the round table "Financial online fraud and fight against it: from the fight against social engineering to the use of technologies to ensure secure payments", held by the "Financial Club".

The total volume of fraudulent transactions increased by 46 per cent on the background of growth of expense transactions by 38 per cent. This is 69 UAH of losses for every million UAH of spending transactions with payment cards. This is 4 UAH more than it was in 2021. However, it is still an increase (by 6%. - Ed.), - said the Deputy Director of the Department of payment systems and innovative development of the NBU Olga Vasileva.

The NB reports that in 2022 was detected:

• 218 thousand illegal actions or fraudulent transactions with payment cards - which is 8% more compared to 2021.
• the average loss increased by 35% and was already UAH 2206.
• 86% -; these are actually fraudulent transactions on the Internet.

Indeed, we see that after the full-scale invasion, the level of fraud has increased significantly. The activity of fraudsters in social networks has increased. It used to be that data was scammed over the phone, but now fraud is moving more into cyberspace, and there's quite a lot of data being scammed on the Internet. As a rule, it happens in chatbots or in channels of different social networks," said Anton Tyutyun, Deputy Chairman of the Management Board, responsible for Sberbank's retail business.

The NBU collects information on recognised losses incurred by banks - card issuers and acquirers, merchants, customers.

In other words, these are statistics on already actually completed investigations. Therefore, it differs, and significantly, from the statistics of the National Police, - said the NBU representative.

The largest volumes of fraud are due to social engineering.

We have introduced a new indicator - "fraudulent operation related to social engineering", and immediately it took 53% of the total amount of losses from all illegal actions, - stated Olga Vasileva.

Phishing is still effective for fraudsters.

The main types of fraud are phishing and social engineering. The population has become more vulnerable because of the war. these two types of fraud account for 80 per cent of all fraud," said Dmytro Musiyenko, member of PrivatBank's retail business board.