phishing

State Bank of India

Truecaller

identity theft

electronic signature

Senior government officials in the IT capital seem to be easy fodder for cyber fraudsters, especially those runningrackets. The latest victim of phishing is B Basavaraju, Principal Secretary, Transport department who lost Rs 99,998 from his salary account after his debit card got compromised when he shared vital information with a caller posing as an employee of his bank, the, Vidhana Soudha branch recently.The senior IAS officer after realising that he was defrauded, lodged a complaint at the cyber crime police station and also contacted his bank to temporarily block any transactions from his account. Prior to this, two Director General of Police (DGP) rank officials of the state realised that their bank accounts had been compromised, after they lost money to online racketeers.The incident happened on November 19. “I received a phone call from a person who introduced himself as Santosh Subrahmaniya. He said that he was calling from my bank to tell me that my debit card was about to expire. It was a busy day and I shared my card details with him without checking on the expiry date embossed on the card,” said Basavaraju.Basavaraju said that Santosh cross-verified his basic bank account details with his account number and told him he would’t be able to use his card as it was expiring soon.“He then called and asked for a One Time Password (OTP) to complete the process. Everything was done in just about five minutes and then I realised that he had stolen Rs 99,998 from my salary account,” Basavaraju added.Admitting that it was careless on his part to trust the caller and share vital information, Basavaraju also added that a public holiday was also coming up in a day and that coupled with a busy work schedule on that day made him slightly distracted.“ There are numerous such incidents getting reported. But I never expected that something like this would happen. I immediately informed my bank manager about the incident and asked them to freeze transactions from my salary account,” Basavaraju added.The number from which the fraudulent call originated is a blacklisted number on. A quick search on the app shows it is listed as ‘SBI’ in the spam caller list and also states Kolkata as the user’s location. The cyber crime police has registered an FIR on November 20 invoking sections 66 (C) and (D) of the IT Act and of the IPC forto fraudulently use password orand online impersonation and cheating.“The message is very simple and everyone should realise that no legitimate bank employee will call the customer over the phone and ask to share debit or credit card details and One Time Passwords to their account. All such calls are fraudulent ones and should be reported,” said a police official.The cyber crime graph in the city seems to be surging as the cyber police station has registered at least 4500 FIRs pertaining to major and minor cyber crimes this year ( till November 30). Identity theft for personal and financial fraud and OTP manipulation feature among the top cyber crimes in the city. The police are also conducting various awareness drives to make the public vigilant and cautious against such fraudsters. In October 2018, AM Prasad, DGP Internal Security also shared his card details over the phone and Rs 2 lakh was illegally transferred out of his bank account. In 2015 the then state police chief Om Prakash had also received such a call seeking account details as the caller took Rs 10,000 from his account. He approached the cyber crime division and the caller was arrested from Chennai.