Elisa says that scammers change their methods as they succeed in preventing the old ones. Next, the operator starts rooting out scam calls, whose callers may not even know they are doing anything criminal.
In all cases, the callers of scam calls may not even know that they are participating in criminal activity, says Elisa’s director of information security. Adobe Stock / AOP
Hundreds of thousands of messages may be sent in a single scam message campaign, but not all of them reach the intended recipients. Teleoperator Elisa says in its press release that it managed to block no less than 1.5 million scam messages in the past six months.
According to Elisa, when the activities of scammers are hindered and prevented, it is typical for them to change their tactics. It says that this has happened in the case of scam calls, for example, when the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom obliged operators to block scam calls detected on their network.
With the obligation that entered into force in October 2023, operators also had the opportunity to prevent fraud attempts from mobile phone numbers of other operators. As a result, Finnish mobile phone numbers have not been able to be used in call scams from abroad.
Scam calls are currently made from countries like Great Britain and India, which have a wide range of call center services. This has made it possible to use ordinary people for criminal purposes.
– More and more criminals acquire scam campaigns as a service from operators similar to a normal company, where the employees work day jobs and don’t even necessarily realize that they are participating in criminal activities. Next, solutions will also be sought to eradicate these scams, Elisa’s information security director Teemu Mäkelä says in the press release, mentioning that Elisa has prevented a total of approximately 23 million scam calls after 2021.
The method of operation can also be considered related to the recently reported phenomenon, i.e. the productization of criminal services, where cybercriminals are even better. They spend more time than before on the steps before the actual attack, i.e. on reconnaissance and arming the intelligence information. Specializing in a specific phase of the attack chain.
According to the security company Fortinet, this makes attacks more precise and effective, as criminals are less omnipresent than before and outsource part of the criminal activity to other actors.