Hello, I’m calling on behalf of bank...
MODUS OPERANDI That’s how most of the calls begin before caller asks for your bank or debit card details and then wipes clean your hard earned savings
When JC Mohanty received a call from a man, who identified himself as an employee of the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, the senior IAS officer had no reason to doubt him.
Mohanty, then posted as additional chief secretary, public health engineering and groundwater department in Rajasthan, considered it a routine call from the bank where he held his savings account. The bank employee asked for Mohanty’s debit card details and even secured the one time password (OTP) sent on the IAS officer’s home. That was on March 22, last year.
The IAS officer smelt a rat only when he got a message about Rs 30,000 being debited from his account. He later found that Rs 2.73 lakh had been withdrawn from his savings account over several days.
Just a week before Mohanty was defrauded, the Jaipur police had arrested three people, including two mobile recharge shop owners, who ran a racket making approximately 50,000 calls in Rajasthan, introducing themselves as bank employees and asking for the account and ATM card details of potential victims.
In the cyber crime lexicon, Mohanty was a victim of vishing or voice phishing. As per the experts, phishing is an attempt at obtaining, through electronic communication, information such as debit and credit card details, banking username, and passwords for malicious reasons.
Vishing, however, is just one of the many techniques used by tricksters to commit financial frauds says Mukesh Choudhary, a cyber crime expert.
Choudhary, who helped in setting up the Cyber Crime Cell in Rajasthan, details how such frauds are conducted.
VISHING
“Debit and credit card frauds have been on the rise in India since 2014. Maximum financial frauds are done using the card details. The most common modus operandi for this is vishing,” Choudhary said.
Vishing or voice phishing is a technique in which frauds are conducted through voice calls. The fraudsters, he says, claim to be bank representatives, ATM representatives, call centre employees, or agents of payment gateways like PayTM and others. “They basically fake their identity to gain the user’s trust to secure his credentials, and dupe him,” Choudhary said.
Many times, while making a payment for a product or service through card, the money gets deducted but the transaction fails. Scammers take advantage of this situation as well. “The user calls the customer care and tells them about the problem. The customer care executive says they will call back the user to resolve the issue,” Choudhary said.
“The call back, however, is from a fraudster. They ask for the customer’s card details to that the money can be refunded. User thinks it is a genuine call and divulges the details,” the cyber crime expert explained.
Choudhary said the fraudsters work in teams. “Some of them work as customer care representatives. Whenever they receive such distress calls, they pass on the information to their teammates. The other members then call back the customer and dupe him,” he said.
Choudhary said fraudsters keep modifying the modus operandi as per the situation.
“After demonetisation, many cases of frauds emerged where tricksters called up people and (Out of these, in 9 cases the culprits represented themselves as bank representatives) Total number of arrests posed as representatives of government. They asked people for their card and bank details to deposit the promised Rs 15 lakh,” Choudhary said.
In the run-up to the 2014 polls, the BJP had said often said that on coming to power, it will ensure that black money parked in tax havens was brought back and was distributed among the poor, with each one getting Rs 15 lakh in their accounts. BJP president Amit Shah had later termed the ‘promise’ a ‘jumla’ or an ‘idiom’ that should not be taken literally.
NIGERIAN FRAUD
Another common way of duping people is what experts have termed the Nigerian fraud. In this, people generally receive an email claiming that they have won a lottery and should disclose their account details where the money could be transferred. The cheats, Choudhary said, have devised new modus operandi.
“Fraudsters befriend people through social networking sites such as Facebook where they pose as affluent individuals from developed countries such as the US or the UK. The cheat will then say that he has sent an expensive gift for the victim. Then a few days later, the intended victim receives a call where the caller claims that he or she is calling from the customs department,” Choudhary said.
The caller informs the victim that there’s a parcel in their name and must deposit a certain amount as customs’ duty so that the package could be released. “Most people have not dealt with the customs’ department and think the call is genuine. They deposit the money in the account they are told to,” Choudhary said.
ROMANIAN GANGS Choudhary said a new pattern of crime has come to fore in which Romanian gangs clone the debit card of a person to dupe him.
The gang installs magnetic strip readers that copy the details in the magnetic strip behind debit cards. The details are then cloned onto a blank card with the help of magnetic strip writers.
“To obtain the pin, they put a camera in the ATM kiosk or at the point of transaction where the customer swipes his card,” Choudhary said.
He said the devices and blank cards required to carry out the fraud can easily be purchased online. Choudhary said Romanian gangs have been caught in Jaipur, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and other cities.
CRYPTO CURRENCY FRAUDS
Choudhary said with the advent of crypto currency, fraudsters have now found yet another avenue. “They are now robbing Bitcoins, the digital currency being widely used all over the world. Bitcoins can then be exchanged for actual currency or can also be used to buy goods,” he said.
THE WAY OUT
“The thumb rule is that you should not disclose your card details to anyone, under any circumstance. Doesn’t matter what they say or how genuine the situation seems. The moment the thumb rule is broken, a fraud takes place,” Choudhary said.
He said a financial fraud should be reported as soon as possible. “People should ideally report the fraud within minutes because then it is easy to recover the money.”
Many report the crime after two to three days, after which the investigation begins. “This creates problems in securing the maximum reimbursement from banks,” Choudhary said.
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