HYDERABAD: While people across the nation are celebrating the thumping victory of Narendra Modi’s BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, cyber fraudsters too joined in the celebrations, albeit in cheating people in the name of Central government schemes.
Taking advantage of the celebratory mood of the people and with an attempt to make money, the fraudsters have been sending messages to mobile users in Hyderabad and all over the country for the past two days, trying to lure them with the news that under Make In India programme two crore laptops are being distributed free of cost among the youngsters.
The message which says more than 30 lakh people have already availed the offer, also has a web link www.modi-laptop.wish-karo-yar.tk to claim the free laptop. Cyber experts and police officials say this is a new way to cheat people and urge them not to fall in the trap.
According to experts, .tk domain is not a domain of the Indian government. All Indian government websites has gov.in url, while the domain mentioned in these messages refers to Tokelau, which is a territory of New Zealand. Once a user clicks on the link, they are asked to share their name, age, state and mobile number. Once the details are given, the browser automatically recognises the number. This, according to experts, helps the website organisers to collect the user’s data or may result in a malware entering their device.
Ch A S Murty, Associate Director, Information Security Education & Awareness (ISEA) says, all these links work for some time and after collecting data, they are closed permanently. “Users should cross check with government websites or websites of the respective ministries or departments for any such schemes, to avoid being trapped. Even people can be trapped using spoofed websites as government websites. Best way is to regularly update browser to recognise malformed URLs,” he says.
He adds never click on any links in e-mails or websites, instead copy and paste the link in a new window. Accessing such websites and links on mobile phones is more dangerous, as they may contain malware and that can gain access to the users’ personal information like bank account details, pictures and mails.
Though there was no complaints with Telangana police in this regards, Cybercrime officials say, the message could be spam and could be a trap from cyber fraudsters and warned users to be alert about such messages.
