Online bank frauds don’t seem to stop at any point soon, and the ways of scamming people are getting unique each time. This time, a city-based doctor ended up losing ₹ 5.29 lakh of her savings, after she received a message with a Google Form link to her mobile phone. The senders asked her to submit bank credentials for unblocking the debit card.
While filling the form online, little did she know that it was a fake SMS and her hard-earned money would be siphoned off minutes after she provided the details, which include user name and password of her online banking account. When a series of debit transactions occurred from her bank account, the 29-year-old doctor contacted the customer care toll-free number, but in vain.
A few hours later, on October 21, she approached the Cyber Crime police of Cyberabad and lodged a complaint and within a month the scamsters were arrested from Jamtara of Jharkhand. Each passing day, cyber criminals are adopting novel ways to cheat people. “After OTP and phishing calls fraud, the scamsters in the notorious Jamtara town started asking people to put Unified Payments Interface (UPI) code apart from other bank details in bulk SMS,” said Cyberabad Police Commissioner V.C. Sajjanar.
When gullible bank customers fill the form and submit it, the semi-literates sitting in Jamtara and other surrounding villages siphon off the money and immediately transfer the amount to their e-wallets. “Post-demonetisation, they shifted to e-wallets and are purchasing online gift vouchers of hypermarkets, jewellery shops and e-commerce websites, and were further redeemed by buying gold ornaments,” the Commissioner said.
Further explaining the fraudsters’ lifestyle in Jamtara, the officer said in the last couple of years there has been a drastic change in how they live and where they stay. “A person who used to live in a shanty now owns a pucca house in more than 3,000 sft space, which shows their scale of cheating,” he said.
Cyberabad police for the first time in the country have arrested the cybercriminals who were using Google Forms to loot people, said Mr. Sajjanar. The arrested were identified as Ram Kumar Mandal, Jamruddin Ansari, Jitendra Mandal, Birender Kumar Mandal from Jharkhand and Rohit Raj from Nalanda district in Bihar. The police recovered ₹ 2.66 lakh, 12 grams of gold ornaments and six mobile phones from their possession.
“Our teams stayed there for more than 20 days to identify and arrest the accused with the help of local police,” he added.
