Hyderabad: A man pretending to be a bank official is calling city residents, asking for their credit/debit card details. The phone number he uses, 08677821902, a Bihar Vodafone connection, has been marked as spam by 51 people in the mobile app Truecaller.
A person who received the call said that the caller spoke in Telugu and claimed that he was calling from the bank. He claimed that the person’s ATM card had been blocked, and in order to unblock the card, the person should reveal the card details.
A cyber crime police from Hyderabad said this was a common ploy used by the scamsters. “They call up people by accessing their phone numbers from various databases, and introduce themselves as bank officials. They then ask for the details of credit/debit cards for the ‘purpose of upgradation’, stating that otherwise the cards will be blocked,” said a cyber crime official.
“Nobody should reveal their debit/credit card details over phone because no bank official will call up a customer over the phone to ask for the details,” said the official. Police said that the callers take down the card details, including OTP, from gullible victims and then use them to transfer money to e-wallets or purchase expensive goods from online stores.
To avoid being tracked, the criminals use spoofing websites to mislead the receiver. “With the spoofing websites, they can conceal the original phone number they are calling from and make another number appear on the screen,” said a cyber crime official. More than 300 cases of these ‘caller frauds” were reported last year in Hyderabad.
