The warnings that you have got so far on the various cybercrimes in the city are not to be ignored. Bangalore city alone has received an average of 13 such cases every day this year. So far, close to 3500 complaints have been registered by the Cybercrime police station on Palace Road in central Bangalore.
Most of the cases happen to be over phone and online. And much of the cases that we came across happen to be people getting cheated from advertisements placed by fraudulent people on mobile apps, websites and even 24-hour shopping channels.
Take the case of 48-year-old Mubin Masarath. On September 29, he ordered for some stuff on Shop CJ, the 24-hour home shopping channel. Around 1230pm, he receives a call asking him to deposit Rs 14,600 into a bank account specified by them over the phone. He does the same and waits for the goods to arrive.
When the products never arrive, he realised the fraud and filed a complaint with the cybercrime police station on October 2, 2018. This was the 3457th complaint received by the cybercrime police station in Bangalore this year.
Another case received just yesterday (October 3) by the cybercrime police station involved a 28-year-old resident of Sanjaynagar, Gagansri. While looking for a job online, she got an email from “werner.burghardt@t-online.de”. For various reasons, the complainant paid several installments to the bank account number specified in the email and ended up losing Rs 81950. While the reasons are not specified in the FIR, these emails usually tap into the greed of the person and promise to pay you someone’s inheritance, or a lottery if you only pay the shipping charges or interest.
When a common person is told that he will get Rs 10 lakh if he just pays 1 lakh, he ends up borrowing the money from everyone and investing all his savings into it, little realising that he is being defrauded.
The moral of the story? Nothing comes easy. If the deal is too good to be true, it usually is fraudulent. And if anybody asks you to pay the money first or asks for your debit/credit card numbers, PIN, or OTP, don’t share it with anyone; not even with the bank, shopping website, TV channel, mobile app or any other financial institution.
