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Nithin Kamath on Thursday raised concerns around the number of phishing frauds, which have gone through the roof in recent times. Kamath, the CEO of India's leading stock broking platform Zerodha, says almost everybody is being targeted these days.
Phishing frauds are online scams where criminals impersonate influencers or popular personalities or organisations in order to get sensitive information or for monetary gains.
Kamath, who is known for his education tweets on business, markets and corporate, said the only way to protect oneself is to not trust anybody asking for money or offering something that seems too good to be true.
He shared a few types of frauds that he had come across recently.
One such case is impersonating government officials and other higher authorities and asking for charitable donations or money for other things.
"Many folks on our team have received social media and WhatsApp messages saying I was in some urgent need of money from fake accounts," Kamath said.
The other way is through fake Instagram social media profiles of well-known people, created by copying everything from the original profile. The followers of these fake accounts then get messages to buy paid courses, scammy penny stocks and crypto.
Nithin Kamath shared an example where his ID was being used for phishing by a fraudster.
The fraudster was seen pitching an online auto program learning and earning crypto scheme in disguise of Kamath. He created a fake Instagram profile of Nithin Kamath and was luring a user by tempting claims of making quick money
"Luring customers to share login credentials by using greed. Once the fraudster has access to the account, losses are created and money is transferred to other trading accounts by trading penny stocks, illiquid options or transferring stocks," Kamath further said.
"The craziest one is fraudsters advertising the customer support number of a large company on Google. When the customer calls up the number, the scamsters ask for a UPI transfer or send UPI pull requests from handles that seem like they belong to the main brand," he added.