For many days now, incidents such as students being lured and losing contact with their families in Tay Ninh, or the case of a female student in Hanoi being " kidnapped online" to defraud nearly 1.2 billion VND... are causing public concern.
In order to clarify the operation of the "online kidnapping" trick and suggest solutions to protect young people from these tricks, Lao Dong Newspaper reporters had an interview with cybersecurity expert Ngo Minh Hieu (Hieu PC) - Director of the "Anti-fraud" project.
As social networks are becoming more and more popular, from the perspective of experts, sir, why are many young people, even though they are knowledgeable about technology, still easily manipulated by cybercriminals and become scammers?
- In fact, students are the group that often lack life experience and self-defense skills in the digital environment and are not fully equipped with information security knowledge. Meanwhile, cybercriminals currently hold a huge warehouse of personal information or can access school databases.
These subjects clearly know the names, schools, addresses, relationships and financial capabilities of each person, thereby planning an attack close to the situation. The mentality of curiosity, desire for achievements or fear of being "taunted" by authorities makes young people easily led, lose the ability to reason and quickly follow the requirements of bad guys.
What sophisticated tricks are being used by cybercriminal groups to manipulate the victim's psychology, sir?
- I think there are two main scams. First, the subjects impersonated the authorities, reported that the victim was involved in a case such as money laundering or drug trafficking, asked to leave the residence to "work secretly", and threatened to arrest him if he did not cooperate.
Second, the subjects can pretend to be an organization that grants prestigious scholarships, informs the victims that they have won a full study abroad scholarship and need to pay fees or submit urgent verification documents. When the victim had trust, the group continued to request money transfers, providing sensitive information or images to control.
Both scripts are based on fear and the desire to achieve results, making it difficult for young people to get caught up in the manipulation cycle.
In your opinion, will the explosion of technologies such as AI, DeepFake or Chatbot... make scams and "online kidnappings" more sophisticated and unpredictable?
- Obviously. With just a few basic data, bad guys can use artificial intelligence to create fake images and videos that look like real people to the point that the family and the victim themselves will have difficulty recognizing them.
The subjects do not need to force the victim to cause self-injury as before but still create images of the injured or private scenes to threaten. The ability to forge voices, faces and messages using AI makes fraud faster, more difficult to detect and causes heavier psychological pressure, thereby increasing the danger of "online kidnappings".
So what specific measures should students, families and schools take to prevent them, and if they are victims, how should they be handled, sir?
- First of all, I think that not only students but everyone need to stay calm, practice slowing down verification in the face of any requests for money transfers, authentication codes or providing sensitive photos.
Especially in the case of a fine payment request, remember that the authorities do not handle work only by phone. If you are in doubt, you should proactively contact or directly go to the police and local authorities for verification.
In addition, it is necessary to tighten the security of social network accounts: set strong passwords, activate two-layer authentication, hide friends, do not publicize emails, phone numbers, addresses or schools...
For schools, educational institutions should organize periodic training sessions on information security. At the same time, parents need to encourage their children to share when encountering unusual situations to handle them together.
If you have fallen victim, the most important thing is to immediately stop the transaction, save all messages, account numbers, images and immediately report to the authorities as well as community support channels. The earlier it is reported, the higher the chance of reducing damage and preventing bad guys from repeating the trick.
