Cons use Aadhaar ruse to clean bank Accounts

BENGALURU: Cyber criminals have hit upon a yet another way to con gullible people of money ever since the government has made linking of Aadhaar numbers and bank accounts mandatory.
In one such case registered at C K Achchukattu police station, a retired college principal lost `64,000 in the matter of a few minutes after a trickster called him posing as a bank official and asked him to seed his Aadhaar number with his bank account.

Ramachandra Upadhyaya, a resident of Kuvempunagar in Ittamadu, told police that he got a call from a person who introduced himself as Dilip Kumar, a manager at State Bank of India.
Dilip Kumar told Ramachandra that his debit card had been deactivated for not linking the Aadhaar number. On the pretext of helping him with the task, he collected the debit card details and also the one-time password (OTP). He then made five transactions within 15 minutes.

Ramachandra revealed the OTPs each time as Dilip said they did not work. The transactions showed that Dilip Kumar transferred the money to e-wallets like Vodafone’s MPESA (`19,999), Airtel money (`19,900), Paytm (`9,999), Oxigen (`3,999) and Ola money (`9,999).  Police sources say this modus operandi of cheating people has become a new trend. Tricksters call up people saying that their bank account has been suspended as it has not been linked with their Aadhaar number and get them to reveal the Aadhaar number and ATM PIN. Later, they ask for the OTP (which they claim to have sent for linking the Aadhaar number with bank account) to steal the money.

PMO had to intervene for registering complaint

Though the incident occurred in April, it took almost four months for police to register Ramachandra’s case. That too only after the intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office.  Ramachandra said, “The incident took place on April 29 around 3pm. I came to know about it after a few minutes. Puzzled by it, I went to Girinagar police station where they said that the place of occurrence of the crime did not come under their jurisdiction and suggested that I go to C K Achchukattu police station. The next day, I went to the police station but they took it very casually and said such incidents happen very frequently. They told me to forget about the money and sent me back home.”

“Later, I called the cyber crime police who said that due to three days of holidays, they could not register the complaint and told me to call me after three days,” he said. “Two days later, a family friend, who noticed that I was depressed, asked me about it. When I narrated the incident and about the police inaction, he helped me write a letter to Prime Minister’s office,” he said. “On August 10, I got a call from C K Achchu kattu police who informed me that they had received directions from the PM’s office to register the case. Finally, I was able to file a complaint and get a copy of the FIR,” he added.