KOCHI: As city residents are shifting to Unified Payment Interface (UPI) apps for various payments, it’s the turn of digital banking fraud that can wipe out a customer’s bank balance by using the UPI route. The latest victim of this is former Cusat Vice-Chancellor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Jain University J Letha who lost nearly `2 lakh, according to police officers.
The online bank fraud of collecting one-time password (OTP) by calling the customer in the guise of bank authorities and loot the money in the savings bank account has become a thing of the past in Kochi.
The new modus operandi is simple. The UPI has a feature wherein an individual or a merchant can send the user a request to collect money. The user needs to authorise the transaction using a security PIN. The fraudsters in the guise of a bank employee or officials of other platforms call the users and convince them to provide the UPI PIN for refunding money or other purposes. They ask the users to provide their UPI PIN to another mobile number, making it easy for the fraudsters to access the OTP. Once they receive the OTP, the perpetrators debit the amount from the account through two quick transactions, said an officer with Kochi City Police Cyber Cell.
As many as 10 such instances were reported in Kochi City Police limits in the past three weeks and in all of these cases, the fraudsters operated from outside the state, according to the police. Another method fraudsters use is spreading fake customer care numbers for banks or UPI platforms. When a user calls these numbers, fraudsters extract sensitive information from them.
Last week, a complaint was registered at Ernakulam Central police station by a person who lost about `1 lakh when he called the customer care number of a Western Union money transfer firm after noticing the number in an advertisement on the internet.
In the Pro Vice-Chancellor’s case, the incident happened around 10.30am on Friday when Letha received a call from a person who introduced himself as a bank official and asked for the last four digits of her debit card number and CVV. Later, she received a PIN on her mobile phone number.
According to the complaint, the caller impersonated a bank employee and told her that he was calling as per the directive of RBI and told the victim that her debit card was blocked and the code number is required for issuing a new chip-based card. Following this, she sent the two PINs received as SMS on her phone to the person.
She realised it was a fraud when she received two messages from the bank confirming a debit of `1,92,499 from her account through two transactions. She immediately lodged a complaint before the City Police Commissioner. Police officers said the perpetrators acquired the OTP to unlock her internet banking account and transferred the money.
A team headed by Kalamassery CI A Prasad and comprising SI Amrut Rangan was constituted to initiate an inquiry. “The police traced the location from where the suspects used the device to log in to the account. An investigation is under way,” said an officer.