NEW DELHI: The lockdown may have gotten most Indians off the streets, but it has also left cyber criminals with more time and opportunity to defraud gullible people into divulging their bank details or hoodwinking them into transferring money to accounts that have no connection with Covid-19 relief operations.
The number of such incidents has risen so much during the past few days that both banks and police authorities have been forced to send out warnings to account holders to be careful of such fraudsters. Even CERT-In (The Union government’s Computer Emergency Response Team) and ReBIT (the IT wing of the Reserve Bank) have issued such warnings over the past few days.
These cyber frauds are being carried out through a large variety of tricks, some of which try to convince prospective victims that their money is being sent to official relief funds like the Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance & Relief in Emergency Situations (PM-CARES) Fund set up for COVID-19 relief. Police and banks both have highlighted other instances of fraud, where account holders have been tricked into divulging their bank details by people posing to be bank officials offering to activate the Centre’s EMI moratorium option for loans.
The State Bank of India (SBI) and other major banks were forced to put out clarifications last week that the EMI moratorium did not require an OTP, because fraudsters were calling customers asking for OTPs in order to activate the EMI relief. Once the account holder provides the OTP, money was transferred out of the account.
“Imposters may contact you to help postpone your EMI payments and request you to share OTP, CVV, password or PIN related to your banking accounts. Stay aware! If the details are shared, the fraudster can have unwarranted access to your banking information leading to financial loss. Beware of EMI Moratorium Frauds!” Axis Bank said in an email to its customers.
Earlier, SBI had also cautioned people against fake UPI IDs doing rounds in the guise of PM-CARES Fund. “Make sure your monetary donation to fight against the global pandemic is going into the right hands,” SBI said. While the original PM-CARES Funds’ UPI ID is pmcares@sbi, fraudsters have been creating similar looking UPI IDs to trick people into sending them their donations. Some of these fake accounts include pmcares@pnb, pmcares@hdfcbank, pmcare@upi and pmcares@icicibank, according to CERT-In.