If you fall victim to online fraud, you don’t have to do a harried rounds of banks. Instead, you could rush a complaint to the police cyber cell.
The other day, the city police helped a woman, a resident of D.H. Road, recover ₹1.6 lakh that had been defrauded from her account. The money was siphoned off from her account after she shared the one time password, received as a text message on her cell phone, with an unidentified person.
The person, by posing as an employee of a major bank, contacted the woman over phone in the guise of updating the details in her bank accounts. Soon after she had shared the OTP, the woman received the shock of her life in the form of another text message, which stated that ₹1.6 lakh was withdrawn from her savings bank account.
Acting on a complaint, the police went ahead on a presumption that the amount must have been diverted to some e-commerce websites and eventually zeroed in on orders placed on her behalf to a couple of those sites. “On finding that they had placed orders for purchasing a brand new smart phone, we soon contacted the sites and got the orders cancelled to retrieve the lost sum,” said officials.
In the wake of the episode, the police have issued an advisory to the public not to share any details of their account or debit or credit cards with unknown persons who contacted them over phone. Officials attribute the motive for at least 60% of the reported cyber crimes in Kochi to illegal gain.
“The fraudsters generally contact the persons and demand the OTP for linking Aadhaar, renewal of ATM or credit card and for redeeming reward points.
Do not share the ATM or credit card number, CVV and OTP with anybody and do not conduct transactions on websites which are unsafe,” said M.P. Dinesh, Commissioner of Police, Kochi city.
