Beware! Fraudsters lay traps in payment apps

KOLKATA: Be careful while accepting unknown payment requests even on the apps promoted by the government. Randhir Jha, a resident of CIT Road in Phoolbagan, learnt it the hard way on March 31 when someone had convinced him to accept the links sent to his phone through BHIM Unified Payment Interface (UPI).



“It was an advance payment for procuring batteries to be used in Jha’s shop located in the same area. Jha made three transactions – twice thinking that his first payment was not accepted – and in the process, he ended up losing Rs 15,000. The next day, he noticed that the link, which he had clicked, was fake,” said an investigating officer from Phoolbagan police station where an FIR was registered in this regard on March 2.

However, police said that fraudsters using the BHIM app to dupe people were not new. They also cited the example of Vijaykumar Srivastava, chief engineer of South Eastern Railway, who was duped in a similar way last year.

A man posing as an official from a PSU bank requested him over phone to download the BHIM app. He assured Srivastava that the app would help him in easy and quick monetary transactions online and that KYC or other papers were not needed for the process. The victim also gave the OTP to the ‘official’ as he thought that the transaction would be done faster.

After a couple of transactions, Srivastava realised that he was duped and around Rs 63,340 was siphoned from his account. He lodged a complaint with West Port police station. The police traced the transactions to an outlet in Varanasi.

“The probe team collected the IMEI numbers of the mobiles purchased from the outlet and one phone was traced in Murshidabad. The owner of the phone was questioned. The chain of sellers was finally traced to a mobile phone supplier, Abhishek Kumar Singh, a resident of Chittaranjan, who was held,” said an officer.