Fraudsters call Tatarstan residents on Thursdays and use school-related pretexts for deception
On the eve of the new academic year, MTS and Positive Technologies presented a joint study on the digital safety of children and parents. Analysts found that fraudsters most often use phone calls (43%) to target minors. The majority of blocked unwanted calls directed at children came from five regions — Moscow and St. Petersburg with their respective regions, Krasnodar Krai, Rostov Oblast and Tatarstan. Nearly half of the calls targeted users aged 11–14.
In the first half of 2026, approximately 92.6 million unwanted calls were placed to Russian citizens under 18 — accounting for 4.4% of the total. The vast majority were promptly detected and blocked. The most vulnerable age group is children 11–14, accounting for 43% of recorded cases. Teenagers 15–17 make up 37%, while children 6–10 account for 21%. Fraudsters most often call on weekdays;
In Tatarstan, the peak occurs on Thursday at 11 AM — a time when children are without direct parental supervision and may answer calls independently.
The primary method used on children is gaming-related: in 36% of cases, fraudsters lure them with free in-game currency or rare virtual items to gain access to parents' payment details. Another 27% exploit the child's desire to "save their parents," 18% involve "saving themselves" and 8% offer illegal earning opportunities. A child often becomes a gateway to the entire family: through them, fraudsters attempt to gain access to bank cards, accounts and other data.
In approximately one in ten gaming-related attacks, the child goes as far as taking out a loan in the parents' name. A separate risk is "dropping" — offers of "easy side jobs" that ultimately involve providing a card to receive and transfer someone else's money for a commission.
According to analysts from MTS and Positive Technologies, fraudsters adapt old schemes to school-related topics when targeting parents. Phishing is disguised as electronic gradebooks, fake stores as back-to-school sales and fraudulent messages as collections in parent chats, benefit payments, enrollment in clubs or tutoring. Criminals exploit parents' busy schedules before September 1: amid a flood of routine tasks, a fraudulent request to transfer money or confirm personal details is easier to mistake for genuine.
According to the MTS and Positive Technologies study, beyond "children's" themes, fraudsters use the same pretexts against minors as they do when targeting adults: posing as telecom operators (20%), government officials (16%), social services (14%), offering additional income (14%), or impersonating postal and marketplace representatives (9%).