CHANDER GUPTA
Payments through digital mode have now become mainstream. We now make payments of various kinds of bills viz. mobile phone bills, landline phone bills, electricity bills, credit card bills etc., sitting anywhere anytime through our smartphones.
Online shopping is done and payments thereof made digitally through the smart phones. Funds can also be transferred likewise. To facilitate all this, mobile wallets have emerged as another medium of digital payments. First, you have to transfer money from your bank account to mobile wallets for spending from it thereafter.
Digital payments can be made even without mobile wallets directly on a service provider’s app with your debit/credit card or internet banking. It has become very convenient. However, with the proliferation of digital payments, online frauds have also mushroomed scaring people away from
the digital.
Previously, a family member has been duped by way of two debits of Rs 49,999 and Rs 49,000 from her account by online fraudsters. The modus operandi adopted will be worth narrating for the benefit of stakeholders. An SMS was purportedly received from a reputed mobile wallet company warning that the funds in the wallet will be blocked unless a call was made on a given mobile number for sorting out KYC-related issues. The unsuspecting/gullible user called that number. The person on the other side, pretending to be the representative of the reputed mobile wallet company asks the caller to download an app ‘Quick Support’.
My unsuspecting relative not only downloads the app as directed but also tells the code number to the ‘representative’ of the mobile wallet company. By doing so, my relative unknowingly gave remote access to her mobile to the online fraudster. She was further directed to transfer Rs 100 from her bank account to her mobile wallet. Her compliance enabled the fraudster to capture her debit card credentials. Now that the fraudster had the debit card credentials and remote access to my relative’s mobile phone for viewing OTPs, two quick debits of Rs 49,999 and Rs 49,000 happened in my relative’s bank account. The OTP SMSes on my relative’s phone, which by virtue of remote access fraudster could also see and apply, alerted my relative too. She got a sense of what was happening and switched off her phone immediately and rushed to the bank to get her Debit Card blocked. Further damage was averted.
Online frauds are cyber crimes in which the victims and perpetrators can be hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. Police stations work on the basis of territorial jurisdiction. It should not be difficult for agencies and banks to trace the money. After all, money has travelled through banking channel only. The recipient account and account holder can be identified. There was an SMS, meant to trigger this chain of transactions, which mentioned a mobile number also. SMS and mobile numbers cannot be anonymous. However the possibility of being easily traced does not deter tricksters from making easy money. It may lead to the inference that the culprits have been escaping the clutches of law.
A pan India dedicated agency should be created to prevent/ detect such sort of crimes lest people lose faith in digital payments. Not only should the siphoned money be recovered, but the culprits should be nabbed to face the law also.