The number of fake theater websites has skyrocketed in Russia

From June to August of this year, experts from BI.ZONE (a subsidiary of Sberbank) recorded a tenfold increase in the number of domains of fraudulent theaters: if at the beginning of summer they found 32 links to such resources, by the end of summer their number increased to 351, according to company research (available from RBC). Another 319 links to fraudulent sites were found in search engines.

Fake theater websites look almost the same as the real ones: they contain a description of the performances of the new season, a poster, as well as a notice about the possibility of buying tickets online in connection with the pandemic. But after payment, the victim, of course, does not receive any tickets.

Most often, the attackers forged the sites of the Theater of Satire, Lenkom, the Maly Theater, the Theater. Leningrad City Council, theaters. Stanislavsky, Vasiliev, Tovstonogov, children's theater "Aquarium". Moreover, for the majority of phishing domains, the scammers took the website of the State Academic Theater of St. Petersburg "Comedian's Shelter" as a basis. As the BI.ZONE expert explained, the interface of this particular site turned out to be easy to fake, but another RBC source in the cybersecurity market explained this by the absence of a special certificate on the specified site and its low level of cybersecurity.

Among the productions cybercriminals most often offered were Three Comrades by Yuri Smekalov and Alexander Tsypkin, Faryatyev's Fantasies, Two on a Swing by William Gibson, Good. Very” by Vasily Shukshin, “Casanova”, as well as “Crime and Punishment” by Konstantin Bogomolov.