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HYDERABAD: In a recent case, a 30-year-old professor of a city college lost Rs 1 lakh while filing income tax (I-T) returns online. Rachakonda cyber crime police said that the victim received a phishing mail claiming to give the link to file online ITRs, and that link led him to a fake website with an identical I-T homepage.

“We suspect more such cases in the coming weeks as the I-T returns for this year are due to be filed by July

31. Apart from the victim, his colleagues had received similar emails. We frequently get complaints about people getting duped after they log onto a fake website,” said S Harinath , assistant commissioner of police (Cyber Crime), Rachakonda.

Recently, nearly 45 FIRs were registered against various types of cyber crimes under Rachakonda commissionerate.

However, police say there are almost 500 verbal petitions since January.

“Most of the cases involve very less amount of money and so the victim does not file an FIR. Only when the amount is in lakhs, people lodge a police complaint,” he added.

“People need to pay more attention to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) before making any payments on such websites. We know how the real homepage looks like. So, we do not check the URL. There are several fake websites that look exactly the same as the original but the URL will be different. Like ‘www.facebook-.com’ might be ‘faceb00k.com’. Though the letter ‘o’ has been replaced by zero, people fail to check such small details,” he said.

So far, over 50 such cases of fake websites have come to the notice of the cyber crime cell. People also get duped when they go to shopping websites.

