Ilyushin Victor Vasilyevich

Ilyushin Victor Vasilyevich

Biography

2024: Victim of phone scammers

In June 2024, telephone scammers lured 13 million rubles from the former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Viktor Ilyushin, promising him help in editing an article about him on Wikipedia.

According to the Telegram channel Baza, "on June 7, 2024, attackers who introduced themselves as Wikipedia administrators called Viktor Ilyushin. They convinced the ex-official to install a special application on his mobile phone, allegedly intended to correct information in the online encyclopedia. In fact, the criminals used this application to gain access to Viktor Ilyushin's bank account.

Within a few days, fraudsters withdrew 12.9 million rubles from Viktor Ilyushin's account. On this fact, a criminal case was initiated on theft on an especially large scale.

As noted by the commercial director of SafeTech Daria Verestnikova, criminals are increasingly using new methods of deception aimed at premium customers of banks. They present themselves as administrators of "Wikipedia" and offer help with background editing. To do this, victims are invited to download a special application, which is actually a banking Trojan.

This application can give access to the control of the victim's smartphone or intercept codes from SMS and push messages, which allows attackers to withdraw money from their bank account, explains the commercial director of SafeTech.

According to Daria Verestnikov, such attacks are becoming more sophisticated, moving from social engineering to technical hacking methods. Despite the targeted nature of the attacks, they pose a serious threat to premium customers of banks.^[1]

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