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I will try, basically we need to separate old known version of phishing. I mean the accurate definition which says that phishing issue is something that first copies an original website and then it also tries to intercept users' sensitive data, like login passwords or credit card data". This is a really canonical phishing and as for scams, major part of them do not attempt to intercept the data, but they try to lure users via a direct interaction with them. So you're starting to lose money immediately. In most cases you even send money directly to the fraudster. You know these examples very well when you live in Russia, when you live in the UK or in some other regions where phone spammers are extremely proactive. And they are trying to deceive you via the phone asking for direct payments, for special data and so on. This is exactly what we can say about this definition. That is what we can say about scams, it is everything that tries to deceive you directly without trying to intercept your data, but phishing is about collecting the data itself.

You know, basically the entrance stage to such sophisticated things like phishing ransomware and so on is rather complicated, but since we're talking about scams, you don't need any specific technical skills. One just needs some time, a cellphone or a laptop and you need to chat with someone. This is not a huge deal for the majority of those involved in scamming. Scam is something preliminary, a starting point for bad guys who began the way to organized crime.

It is still working mostly because the last two years were not so easy for any of us. There was a real era of global pandemic. And everybody was just sitting at home. There were no possibilities for cooperation, for communication and so on and that means that scammers decided to expand their presence on the market if it can be called like this. It means that scammers are developing special tools and that's why they're expanding their presence on the market very rapidly because as soon as you develop something not so sophisticated, easy to use, you start focusing on developing really great user experience tools. This means that you don't need special techniques or special knowledge to operate those. That's why this disaster is expanding significantly.

I think it is not the best idea to promote such tools. Okay, let's try to maybe uncover some of t the tools that scammers use nowadays. They have a broad range of different techniques starting from something pretty similar like special bots for telegram that make it possible to generate different fake pages in order to lure victims and up to different sophisticated things like manipulating traffic and so on. These are two opposite sides of the market, because if you need to deceive users, manipulate their paid traffic, lead generation and so on you, really need to be a sophisticated guy. You really need to go deeper, as to technology you need to know how to lure the traffic, how to attract people, how to work with online digital marketing and so on. But when you have a specially developed tool for just deceiving people directly (this is again scam). You don't need sophisticated technologies, you don't need special knowledge. So, these are the two opposite sides, but also, there are lots of things related to promoting fake pages, fake websites via for instance social media advertising networks, and considering the fact that social media channel expanded at least 40% for the past year, more different types of those advertisements and promotions within the social media channel started to appear. This also means that scammers also became much more proactive. Therefore, we have different types of scams, starting from different pension funds scams. This is a type of scam, which is pretty popular in European and North American regions. Why it is popular? Because people here really are aware of the fact that their money is deposited in the pension funds and when they see a possibility to increase their funds, or to invest that money, to make it work somehow, these opportunities catch their attention. Scammers use this situation to promote fake pages targeting people, offering some special pension funds facilitation "Hey guys, we will help you with refunding" or "We will help you to manage the money channels" and so on, and people get deceived. Also, during the pandemic, the second, I would say very interesting and very rapidly growing part of scamming were HR scams. When people are trying to find a job, they are doing it remotely via LinkedIn, via Facebook and when they see some advertisements from different promotions, they follow them. They see something like this: "Hey there is a huge company who hiring people right now". I need a job, right? So, I will go and try to apply for this vacancy. As a matter of fact, HR agencies are often using the same techniques for traffic attraction. They're always trying to attract people via social media advertising networks. They create strange-looking landing pages on really weird domain names and they promote those links within social media advertising networks.

They're not scammers, but for a typical user it is hard to distinguish what is scamming and what is real and so on. This is a really tricky issue. There are other types of scams, those types of scams we mentioned above, mostly attacked real users. I mean like b2c scam from business scammers like cooperating in special organized groups and trying to deceive ordinary people. At the same time there are different examples of b2b scams, when organized groups of scammers develop a product, develop their tools to deceive huge companies, then such cases also influence those industries which are not typical targets for any types of fraud and scam: for instance, agriculture or different types of heavy industry. People are trying to use the man in the middle attack. in order to deceive employees from a company or lure them into making fake payments to scammers. This is also extremely important, and it is not described by major companies, it is not mentioned in many parts of local laws that this is prohibited and so on. It has been a huge challenge for the past two years for a major part of online audience that exists nowadays.

I may tell you one of the major scams which was really expanded enormously.
This scheme was discovered by our analysts in 2019 and for the past two years (for 2019 and for 2020) it has expanded significantly. Its presence is not limited to Russian-speaking territory, it was spread worldwide, and there is a special name for this scheme: Classiscam and this is also a beautiful example not in terms of the legal side of course but as an example of how small scam can expand within a couple of years if it is not treated in an appropriate way. The scammers started as a small group, they developed those bots trying to deceive people on marketplaces and within two years they started to attract "workers". These are the guys, who are using these bots to deceive people directly and after that there is a kind of a revenue sharing model. That's how the developers of the tools are sharing money with the workers. The number of workers nowadays is more than 12,000 worldwide. This is extremely huge number of people involved into this scheme, but they started from 20 people who were developing those bots and also using them to get the money.

Yeah, of course. I assume that this is a guy in a hoodie driving a Lamborghini somewhere close to Canary Islands, if we are speaking about the earnings, but if we speak about their background, they are not mature criminals. They're just trying to come up with something and only afterwards they understand what they did. That's what we can say about the admins of these groups, but if we speak about the workers, I mentioned previously, these are really boys and girls, aged between 16 and 17. Most of them are not mature enough to understand what they're doing, for them, it's just a game, imagine trying to hack someone's laptop, it is a real crime in your mind. But when you try to chat with someone and say like " – Hey man, I want to get the goods you offer for sale on the marketplace. – Fine, just send the money for the delivery and that's it". And you get something like 20 euros or 5 euros. They scammers are known to use other currencies. So, this is not a huge sum for just one case. When you just imagine that you are doing something like this it sounds more like a game, because you feel like "Hey this guy just spent 20 bucks on me. This is not a huge price for something and for you". It's just a game and this is the worst thing that may happen because as soon as you understand that you're doing something illegitimate that means, that you understand what happens next. But if you don't understand it, it leads to a severe crime afterwards, because starting with 20 bucks later you will come to something stronger, more sever. And this is a problem.
It always happens so with no jokes. You can talk to other guys from instigation team, from incident response team and they will be a way of the typical pattern of all those criminals. They will literally knocking the doors and they are and they will. The biggest trouble is that persons really don't know what they're doing. So this is the major problem.

It happens all the time, no kidding. You can talk to other guys from investigation team, from incident response team and they will tell you about the typical patterns of all those criminals. They were literally knocking at the doors, and they are, and they will. The biggest trouble is that people really don't know what they're doing. So, this is a major problem.

To be honest, yes, of course, and we're doing it. In Group-IB we are trying to educate people and cover such issue. However, we also need different regulators, different authorities, huge brands to work with people, to work with the audience, to work with those who listen to them. This is also extremely important, because if we go back to that example with classiscam. A lot of different marketplaces were affected by this scheme, if they start working with their audience and their consumers, it really may help to increase the awareness about these types of scam without huge efforts, which will significantly decrease the negative impact.

You know, basically this is extremely similar to what happens in situation related to other types of cybercrime. Definitely there are special groups of scammers targeting in some different industries who involved or who got used to a certain pattern or to a certain scheme. This means that they of course are also trying to expand their presence, also they are trying to affect different industries, but anyway, they have the most preferable approach, the most profitable type of scam that they use. Same goes to other types of cybercrimes and other violations. So, all of them prefer to work on something exact.

- Okay, I have lots of answers. The first one is connected to our extremely distributed infrastructure: different offices, headquarters, just recently we opened threat intelligence headquarters in Dubai. This is extremely beneficial, extremely helpful for us in terms of data collection, for making analysis, and for building up our presence. However, still the world is in a global lockdown. This is a bit difficult to work in such conditions, of course, we can do everything online, because we are a cybersecurity company. In some cases we really don't need to be at the place, but we prefer to work with everyone face-to-face. So, this is kind of a problem. The next reason is the pandemic. It may be hiring. It is a major issue for now since we are expanding very rapidly and we have a really huge plan in Singapore, in Dubai, in Amsterdam. We had a huge hiring plan. We are really hungry for highly skilled specialists from different segments of industry (for threat hunting, for incident response, for digital risk protection, for CERT teams). So, we are hiring more and more people, but since everything is closed and we have to make those personal meetings with candidates online. We are a bit disappointed by this fact as well as our candidates because they also want to come to our offices to talk to us, to have some knowledge sharing sessions and so on. Yep, so these we really miss these parts of the dialog. We have some difficulties because of these lockdowns, but despite everything, we are expanding and very rapidly. So, guys, if any of you are interested in doing some really cool things, if you want to be a Superman (or maybe Batman, but mostly Superman) then please just don't hesitate to call us, even 24 hours 7 days a week. Because we had our own all CERT team and they will probably pick up the phone even if you are calling to apply for a vacancy late at night.

So, the best thing is, I would say this is common for the entire Group-IB team this is the feeling that we are really making the world a better place. Because when we see that we successfully eliminated a scam scheme targeting, for instance, pension funds when you understand that these grandpas and grandmas will live in a safer world. So, this is the major thing. We have no limitations; we do our best to develop cool features and so on. This is also driving me, but the major thing that's we're really making the world better by fighting against all these crimes of different severity.

I thought you were going to ask me about our local achievements, which is called "challenge coins" at Group-IB and the process of getting those, cause this is also is extremely interesting for our teammates and sometimes even much more interesting than anything else. So this is also perfect.

But about the Frost & Sullivan Award it is extremely also important that huge consultants, huge analytics started to discover new areas. They understand the importance of different types of digital risks like scams, phishing and etc. So it is extremely important. For instance, Forrester just started a dedicated category for digital risk protection. And speaking about Frost & Sullivan, they made an overview of these here and so we got into top three in the report even during a beta stage. This is also quite cool, but I would say that it is extremely exciting for us, but we understand that we should not stop, and we still have a lot of extra miles to go so have no time to enjoy this excellence because itis like riding a bicycle. When you are happy and decided to stop pedaling, this means that you are going to fall very soon. We were really happy maybe for a couple of hours, but then we got back to work and started to develop some new cool features.

You know, speaking about the list of speakers, I really cannot not make the choice, because everyone is a really awesome specialist, and we will discuss extremely important topics there. Starting from the digital risk trends and up to different projections of what can be done. If you go through the list of speakers, we have guests from the United Nations International Computer center, from Forester, from World Vision International. And all these people are aware of digital risks. They are really aware of what is happening to scams, to different types of other digital attacks and so on nowadays. And they're really willing to not just willing, but they are really doing a great job in fighting all these crimes in a an impressive manner.

First of all, we are using neural networks in the minds of our analysts. Of course, we're using neural networks for the DRP, but I would not use the word product, it is about our platform, this is more than just a product it is not a standalone thing, and at Group-IB we have lots of frameworks, platforms, things that are operating in strong collaboration with each other and so on, I would not call them products. This means that you are getting something bigger than just a standalone product. We use those and I would say that this is a really great challenge because you have to analyze lots of things, you have to work with lots of pages, signatures, IOCs and so on. So you have to do a great job day by day. And when you try to work with these solutions only manually or you are trying to build some kind of a solid logic that will carry out a step-by-step analysis something you will never achieve your goal. So, neural networks are the future, and I would say that this is not about typical operations like image recognition. This is very simple nowadays, maybe three or four years ago it could be called a great feature, but not now. Now we are developing some special families of neural networks designed to verify whether this particular page is infringing or not. This is something more and this is extremely beneficial.

Thank you for joining us. It was a pleasure to have you here, greetings from Amsterdam, and I hope to see you all. Please submit your application to become a part of Group-IB, part of the team. Yeah, thank you Camill. Thank you for joining us!