Reddit user reveals how he was nearly tricked by someone
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Hyderabad: While the country battles with cybercrime on a daily basis, it’s always good to hear of the general public being prepared to go one-up on a cyber criminal. One such person, Reddit user oldmonq, shared his experience with the community this week where he recorded a conversation with a person who had phoned him claiming to be from the ‘Reserve Bank of India’, calling to “verify his debit card”.
Strangely the caller, he wrote, was also identified on the widely-used TrueCaller phone number detection app as being from the Reserve Bank of India’s “Verification Department”. But oldmonq, realising that the caller was a fraudster, gave him details of an card that had already expired. After keeping him on the line for a good five minutes, the caller, realising he himself was being duped, went into an expletive-laden retort, threatening he would “use the card for transactions”. “Ab dekh main yahin se transaction karta hu (watch as I conduct a transaction from right here),” he threatened.
While incidents like these are common, U. Ramamohan, SP, Cyber Crime, CID, says that it’s not impossible to track these fraudsters down. “They’ll commit the crime several times,” he says, “So their call data records, their tower locations will be known. They’ll be hacking an account and using that they will purchase something… delivery information, all that will come into the picture.” Ramamohan incidentally had a talk in Hyderabad on Tuesday, about how scamsters were increasingly using tactics to steal information from mobile phone users.
But Sandeep Mudalkar, a cybercrime forensic expert explained why phone numbers and even caller IDs cannot be trusted anymore because phone numbers are in pubic domain. Criminals acquire phone numbers and email from restaurants and shopping malls with the help of collaborators. Many are blindly handing over details at these places.”
He also says that anyone can now list their numbers with a particular name on the usually reliable TrueCaller database: “We can list numbers as any officer’s or company’s name. Do not go by caller ID apps.”
And whenever you call anyone, that name will be shown there. If you want to unlist yourself, you can go to truecaller.com/unlist.” Ramamohan spoke at a cybercrime awareness session on Tuesday evening, where he insisted that cybercrime depended on working knowledge of technology and the kind of security checks that were in place. He explained that better awareness was needed from the general public.
“Cybercrime happens, not because criminals are too intelligent, but because we are too fragile,” said Ramamohan, adding that even the best of security measures you take to protect your information online can still be vulnerable.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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