Online Fraud A Raging Menace

Your Phone Has Now Become An Instrument In The Hands Of The Cyber Criminal To Rob You Of Your Hard-earned Money. What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

- AMITABH SRIVASTAVA, PRADIP R. SAGAR

Talk to anyone around you these days, and chances are they or someone they know have fallen prey to online financial fraud.

Vishal Singh, a 53-year-old working for cloud communications company Sinch in Gurugram, was in an office meeting when he got a missed call from his boss on Whatsapp. He did wonder why he was using a different number, but since the profile picture was his boss’s, he ignored his misgivings. His boss said he needed a favour but couldn’t talk as he was in the middle of a customer negotiation. Claiming that he was in urgent need of cash, he asked Singh to send across some Google gift coupons in Rs 5,000 denomination. Since Singh didn’t have Google Pay, Singh told his boss his inability to do what he asked. His boss then asked him to pay 10 coupons of Rs 5,000 each from Paytm. He sent him a QR code, and Singh sent the money. Then, his boss asked him for another Rs 50,000. Singh obliged. It was when he asked for another Rs 1 lakh that Singh called his boss’s secretary to find out what was up. The secretary asked him to stop immediately as the boss was on leave in Chandigarh. When Singh called him up, his boss confirmed the same. Singh immediately rushed to the nearest cyber crime police station to register a complaint.

Singh was the victim of one of the many kinds of online frauds that have become rampant in the country. The surge in numbers is explosive. At the 1930 helpline run by the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, there were 700,000 complaints of online fraud in April 2023 alone, nearly 100,000 of them from just Uttar Pradesh (see