In 2023, fraudsters using online technologies stole about 16 billion rubles from Russians. At the same time, the number of scam sites increased by 86% and the number of attacks via instant messengers increased from 12% to 22.5%. Yandex’s Deputy Commercial Director for Quality Aleksey Goncharov told socialbites.ca.
According to the expert, attackers have become even more active in luring users to their pages using provocative headlines and shocking advertising content. As a rule, flashy slogans lead to sites with irrelevant content and have nothing to do with the subject of the ad.
“They can hide low-quality products, fake stores or pages that recruit contacts and fill them with spam,” said Alexey Goncharov.
Also, with the help of unscrupulous ads, scammers can persuade you to proliferate sites of popular platforms. The design and content of such a resource completely copies the original, and the domain name differs slightly by one or more characters.
Yandex relies on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to fight fraudsters. Algorithms analyze the content, URLs and other parameters of ads to determine the integrity of the ad.
In particular, AI helps combat so-called text cloaking, which attempts to make text unsuitable for machine analysis by changing characters in keywords.
For example, an ad containing the word “casino” would not pass automatic review due to the ban on gambling ads, so scammers may use options such as “casino0” to bypass the filter. Neural networks can counter such tricks.
Another tool called Tracker tracks user activity on an advertising site, counting the number of clicks, time spent on page, etc. saves. The ad may be blocked if user behavior seems suspicious.
The company also uses “Anti-Scam” and “SafeSearch” algorithms that automatically search for and block immoral or malicious content on the network.
According to the expert, Yandex rejected more than 35 million suspicious ads and blocked 214 thousand accounts in 2023.
Alexey Goncharov added that ordinary users can help fight scammers by submitting complaints about dubious ads. The company processes up to 112 million such messages per month.
happened before known It’s about a new way to fool Russians using a smartphone.