Hyderabad: The Rachakonda police cautioned of a likely increase in cyber fraud cass related to online and mobile financial transactions, including use of e-wallets if safety precautions are ignored.
Cases booked with the police indicate such a trend. Rachakonda commissioner of police Mahesh Muralidhar Bhagwat in an awareness meet on cashless transactions and cyber security for police personnel from different police stations at Infosys on Monday, said, “We are strengthening cyber crime wings of our commissionerate and have sent proposals for cyber crime police stations for each zone as in the days ahead frauds linked to mobile transactions may increase substantially.”
He said the police was receiving complaints about a few hundred rupees siphoned off from the e-wallet app Mobikwik of a customer in Malkajgiri police station, to big cases where lakhs were swindled by cyber crooks.
“If there are more than two cases we will open suspect sheets. Recently a Nigerian, who is an accused in a fraud case, revealed that a related laptop contained one lakh e mail ids and five lakh mobile phone numbers which reveals the scale the fraudsters are targeting.’’
According to the Rachakonda cyber crime police, in 2016, they received at least 10 cases in which suspects used e-wallets as an intermediary source for siphoning off funds.
Rachakonda cyber cri-me sub-inspector D. Ashish Reddy said, “We have registered a case regarding a retired emp-loyee of Dilsukhnagar losing '4.07 lakh where fraudsters used voice phising or vishing and stole bank details of the customer.”
He said the customer had a limit of more than Rs 4.5 lakh on his credit card. “They called up on the phone pretending to be bank officials and took all personalised banking data. They had multiple PayTM accounts linked to their bank accounts. As there is a transaction limit of Rs 10,000, they did 38 transactions by asking the OTP each time and transferred money to multiple PayTM accounts in two days,” he said. Police found that the fraudsters’ calls originated from Jharkhand.
PayTM vice president Kiran Vasireddy said, “Our wallet has security features. There must be some kind of lapse on the banking side in this case. There is a limit of '1 lakh in the wallet and '25,000 transaction in a month for customers. This is not applicable for merchants whose KYC details we have and who are registered with us.”
He said as a safety feature, if a device was changed the user would need to log in again. “More importantly the money cannot be transferred to other bank accounts but only to the source,” he said.
