Hyderabad: Purnima Reddy, a recruitment manager, received a call from an unknown number recently. The caller told her that while he was trying to register online, he mistakenly put in her number, which was similar to his. The caller said Purnima would get an OTP (one time password), and she should forward it to him.
But Purnima was no fool. “I told him to call me with the number he claimed was similar to mine so that I could verify it. He told me he did not have credit in that line. I got online to find out more, only to discover he was actually trying to reset my bank online/Yahoo mail password, and that he is a fraudster, an account hacker. If I had given him the code which was sent to my phone, he would have used it to reset my bank online and mobile app account,” Purnima wrote in a post online.
A city-based scientist was cheated of Rs 60,000 through this OTP fraud recently. “In my case, the caller addressed himself as Rahul and spoke in poor English, and claimed to be an SBI employee. I was told that he was issuing me a new credit card, for which he had to transfer rewards points. Details like credit card number, name and other credentials shared by him were right, thus, trusting him, I shared the OTP generated to my mobile. Minutes later, Rs 60,000 cash was transferred from my salary account. A case has been booked with the City Cyber crime wing.” In May 2016, a sum of Rs 50,000 was fraudulently withdrawn using the net-banking facility of a state government employee residing in Vishakapatnam.
The victim’s mistake was that he revealed the OTP that he received on his registered mobile number when requested to do so by a telephone caller pretending to be from the bank’s customer care department. In February this year, Ahmedabad city police busted a gang that cheated a businessman of Rs 75 lakh. The cyber thieves accessed the OTP from the victim’s bank by obtaining his mobile SIM card using duplicate documents.
