Due to a single "click," the Kirov entrepreneur lost almost 4 million.

      The Kirov City Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia received a statement from a 23-year-old individual entrepreneur who owns a hotel business. The woman reported the theft of 3.6 million rubles from her bank account. Neither she nor her employees personally signed any payment orders.

      During the investigation, the police reconstructed the chain of events. The virus entered the corporate network after one of the individual entrepreneur's employees opened a file sent to their email from an unfamiliar address. The attachment was labeled "invoice for materials" — a typical working document for an entrepreneur. However, disguised as an invoice was a malicious program.

      After the program was activated, the criminals gained remote access to the individual entrepreneur's bank account and withdrew all 3.6 million rubles that were there. As the operatives found out, the money did not leave directly — it first went to the account of another individual entrepreneur registered in the Rostov region. That person also turned out to be a victim of the fraudsters, and their account was used as a transit link. The final account to which the funds were cashed out has not yet been identified.

      A criminal case has been initiated under part 4 of article 158 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("Theft in especially large amounts"). In addition, the Ministry of Internal Affairs is considering the initiation of a case under part 2 of article 273 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("Creation, use, and distribution of malicious programs").

      In this regard, the police once again urge Kirov residents and entrepreneurs to be extremely cautious in online correspondence. It is advisable not to open attachments with extensions such as *.exe, *.bat, *.vbs, *.scr, *.zip, *.rar received from strangers. One careless action, as this case confirms, can lead to multimillion losses.