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How People Lose Money to Online Frauds?

IamCheated.com Research Team | June 11, 2019  7:12:pm

How people lose money to online frauds?

The internet has helped in many ways as you can do a lot of things, from the comfort of home. Be it buying food items, booking tickets or paying utility bills, you can do it all online through the internet. While the internet is widely used, cybercriminals are misusing it to carry out online frauds. Online frauds are increasing each day and many innocent people have fallen prey to these frauds, losing a lot of money. According to a survey, 1 in 4 customers who transact online, is a victim of online fraud.

The sad part of online frauds is, even educated people are losing their hard-earned money, falling victim to fraudsters. The main reason why online fraud is increasing in India is due to lack of knowledge. Many people are still unaware that they are not supposed to share personal banking information. So, we at IamCheated.com believe that fraud awareness is the first step towards fraud prevention. It is very important for each citizen to be aware of the frauds that are happening around.

In this blog, we will discuss two incidents where people have lost their money to online fraud.

See Also: How fraudsters steal your credit card details?

Incident number 1:

Recently an engineer who works at an MNC, wanted to cancel his movie ticket, which he had booked on an online ticket booking site. While he was searching for the customer care number, he found a couple of numbers on the google search engine. He tried calling one of the numbers, but it didn’t get connected, so he called up the other number. But, nobody picked it up.

After sometime he received a call from the same number, and a person claimed to be the customer care executive of that company. He also told the engineer that he would help him cancel the movie ticket.

In order to cancel the ticket and initiate the refund, the engineer was asked to provide the last 6 digits of his bank account number. As soon as he provided the last 6 digits of his account number, Rs 50,000 was debited from the account.

How to avoid this fraud?

1. Never rely on the customer care number which comes up in the search engine. Instead, you must visit the official website of the company and collect the customer care number.

2. Never reveal your customer care number to anyone over the phone.

Incident number: 2

Recently, a couple was cheated by a fraudster who claimed to make a payment through an app. The couple named Palkar and Nitisha both worked at Accenture. Nitisha's elder sister Harsha, who was running a cable tray business at Pune, called and informed her that a client wanted to make the payment through a Payment App.  As Harsha didn't have that app, she gave Nitisha's phone number to the client.

After sometime, Nitisha received a phone call from Harsha's client and he said that he wanted to make a payment of Rs 30,000 through the Pay App. The caller sent a link to Nitisha and asked her to click on the link.  After sometime she received a bank alert message stating that Rs 10,000 was debited from her bank account.

When Nitisha called the client and informed him on the debit message, the client said there was some technical glitch and the amount would be credited to her account. The client asked Nitisha to give someone else's number, so that he could transfer the money to that number. Believing this to be true, Nitisha gave her husband Manish's number and fraudster replicated the same procedure on Manish. After clicking the link, Manish lost Rs 11,000 from his bank account.

To avoid this kind of fraud you must never click on a suspicious link, which is sent to you through a message or an email.

See Also: How to Avoid Being a victim of UPI Frauds?

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