Cyber Crime Wing in Chennai issues advisory on phishing links to India Post Payments Bank customers

The police have urged the accountholders not to link on SMS with a message, “Dear customer, your India Post Payments Bank account has been blocked. Please update your PAN number” and not to share any PAN or Aadhaar details on the link

The Cyber Crime Wing of Tamil Nadu police has issued an advisory on new modus operandi of cyber fraudsters.

Recently, a complaint was received by the Cyber Crime Wing, on a financial fraud in which fraudsters targeted the customers of “India Post Payments Bank (IPPB)” and contacted them through sending SMS containing malicious links to their mobile numbers.

The SMS said: “Dear customer, your India Post Payments Bank account has been blocked. Please update your PAN number”. Believing this, the gullible victim clicked the malicious link sent by the fraudsters through the SMS. Subsequently, the fraudsters created a link opened by the victim which contained a fake webpage similar to IPPB mobile banking web page asking for account number, customer ID, mobile number, date of birth, PAN and Aadhaar.

After providing details on the webpage sent by fraudsters, it would ask for OTP (one-time password) from the customer. The advisory said as soon as the OTP is entered in the webpage, the amount gets debited from the account.

Additional Director-General of Police, Cyber Crime Wing, Sanjay Kumar, appealed to the public not to click on any links received from unknown sources through SMS, e-mail, WhatsApp, Telegram and other social media handles and also not to share OTP with anyone over phone call, message or phishing websites.