West Bengal: Seniors hit the most by cyber frauds during pandemic, say experts

KOLKATA: To mark World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, Indian School of Ethical Hacking (ISOEH) and Cyber Security Centre of Excellence, West Bengal organised a discussion and workshop on ‘Digital Technologies for Older Persons and Healthy Ageing’ on Tuesday.
The discussion stressed on how the pandemic has made everyone, especially senior citizens, dependent on technology, focussing that people should be aware of cyber security.
The discussion highlighted that senior citizens mostly fell prey to cyber frauds across the city.
An anti-fraud guide book for senior citizens — ‘Cyber Security for End Users 2022 Handbook’ — was also released. Director of Calcutta Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Indrani Chakravarty, said that senior citizens faced many problems during the pandemic. “As everything was being done online, the senior citizens had difficulty in accessing banks and buying medicines and other essentials. They did not have access to domestic help as well. We noticed many senior citizens suffered from insecurity and psychological problems during the pandemic.”
Another speaker, Anuradha Sen, director, advocacy, HelpAge India, said that senior citizens find it difficult to cope with digital technology and can’t figure out what is genuine and fraud. “During the pandemic, the senior citizens had no alternative but to use online banking for different services and often they became victims of cyber frauds. It is due to the lack of awareness that they shared OTPs, KYCs and banking details with cyber fraudsters,” Sen added.
Sandeep Sengupta, director of ISOEH, gave a presentation on the latest cyber frauds and listed a few measures. One of the most common frauds, according to him, is the one where people complain of not getting any OTP or bank message but money has been debited from the account. He said that people should verify WhatsApp forwards, many of which are fake.
“To protect Gmail and WhatsApp, it is necessary that one should enable the two-step verification to keep themselves protected from cyber frauds,” stressed Sengupta, adding that simple measures like giving a missed call to the number on any e-commerce portal can verify whether the site is genuine or not. If that number is invalid, one will realise that the site is not genuine.