#BewareFraud: Woman pulls a fast one on DCP

BENGALURU: #BewareFraud is the hashtag with which DCP Abhishek Goyal has been running a twitter campaign along with the city police to warn citizens about creditdebit card fraudsters. But a fraud attempt was made on the IPS officer when a lady caller sought his card details on Tuesday morning.
As Goyal discovered, the caller was in possession of his card number. As a graduate in computer science from IIT Delhi, he was not surprised about it as he is aware most of the data sometimes get into wrong hands.

The city police traced the call to Jharkhand, and the truecaller app showed the identity of the caller as Fakers. The police even put out a tweet giving the mobile number, name and ad dress and the date of its activation.

A police officer told ET investigations often lead them to innocents as fraudsters buy SIM cards using the identity of others and deactivate the number after some amount of success in crime. “Until telecom operators strictly comply with KYC norms and issue SIM cards to genuine customers, this kind of crime attempts will go on happening,“ he said.

The police say and many victims vouchsafe these calls usually emanate from a remote place in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Jharkhand because the callers know the police of a faraway state won't track them down.

The police twitter history shows people disclosing mobile numbers from which they received calls and requesting the police to trace them. Some even request the police to block the numbers. In spite of police carrying out a sustained campaign, many are falling prey as callers authoritatively introduce themselves as bank officials, win confidence and politely extract card details.

On Tuesday evening, one caller abused Santosh Kumar, an executive with a cor porate hospital in Bengaluru, in Hindi and threatened to transfer his funds to an RBI account when he refused to re-confirm his card number. “This man claimed himself to be from Canara Bank ATM cell and demanded details on the grounds that the card was not linked to Aadhaar. He even read out my card number and wanted me to confirm the last four digits,“ Kumar said, and added: “I cut the call but he called me eight times. I am still in a state of shock.“

A public sector bank employee said the number of complaints about online frauds from customers has been on the rise. Customers visit their branch after falling prey but in many cases, fraudsters make online purchases. The police, in many instances, refuse the register the complaints and turn away the victims.