The Interior Ministry told about the fraudsters' trick of "hijacking" Telegram accounts

Scammers gain access to Telegram accounts under the pretext of transferring a work or local chat to another platform. This was announced on February 26 by the Department for the Organization of the Fight against the Illegal Use of Information and Communication Technologies (UBK) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.

"The scheme of "hijacking" Telegram accounts through "moving chat". In working or local chats, which are usually quite large, with dozens or even hundreds of participants, a pseudo—official message is published stating that due to the "slowdown" the chat is allegedly being moved to a new site," the department's Telegram channel says.

It is noted that the posted link does not lead to a new chat, but to a fraudulent bot. There, the user is asked to confirm participation by specifying the phone number and the SMS code.

After transferring this data, the attackers gain access to the account and can use it to further spread malicious links and attacks, including within the same team.

Letters of Misfortune: how government employees are being deceived by hackers

One of them opened the attackers' emails five times, and the other sent a malware file to his colleagues, asking them to help open it.

On the same day, the Russian Interior Ministry reported that the attackers were posing as delivery service employees and using the Telegram messenger to lure the code from the Gosuslugi portal. The agency advised not to transfer any codes to unknown persons, and to check the delivery status, use only official websites.

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