D J Venkatesh
Diglipur, July 18: In yet another case of Cyber Fraud, one more Islander has been cheated by cyber criminals. Mrs. Rina Mondal W/o Anup Ganguly R/o Subhash Gram, Diglipur today reported Andaman Sheekha that she received a call at night hours from +919006078798 stating that her number is a lucky number and she had won some cash prize and the amount will be transferred to her bank account through BSNL.
The caller asked Mrs. Rina for her bank account number and her ATM PIN which she provided readily to receive the gift amount in her account, without even giving a second thought.
As soon as the call ended that night the caller reportedly started to withdraw money in seven different transactions, through the Airtel Money Service. That night the caller had reportedly withdrawn total Rs. 25,000 from Mrs. Rina’s account but surprisingly she did not receive any SMS alerts for those transactions.
Mr. Anup Ganguly, the husband of Mrs. Rina Mondal contacted the local SBI branch for enquire about the matter. The bank officials informed him that the transactions were made from Bangladesh and the Bank cannot do anything in this regard.
But, when Andaman Sheekha checked for the location of the number online, through www.way2sms.com, we found that the number belonged to Tripura or Mizoram Circle another service reported the number to be from Bihar or Jharkhand Circle and is potentially a number provided service through Airtel if not ported to any other network.
All the Banks repeatedly through SMSs alerts, hoardings and in many other ways create awareness among its customers on not to share their ATM Card PIN with any one and in any situation but still we find such cases where the PIN is shared by the customer without hesitation with some unknown caller, out of greed. Cyber criminals usually take advantage of this greed or innocence and loot public. Several dozens of such incidents have already been reported in Andamans.
The ATM Card PIN is a confidential four digit number which should not be shared with anyone not even with the bank employees even if they ask for it. The State Bank of India, Andaman Chapter should intervene into the matter and help the victim to get her amount back and also help the authorities to track those cyber criminals who are continuously targeting Islanders from Mainland India.
In this entire episode the role of telecom operators are also questionable as in most of the cases the customers are usually contacted via SMSes first by the cyber criminals. There are some numbers in which if a request is sent, all the spam SMSes are automatically blocked but experts believe that many telecom companies do not publicize the numbers as that would lead to heavy loss to the companies. Even in Andaman none of the telecom companies advertise about those numbers, to block such spam SMSes.
Bank and Allway informing citizen about these kind of fraud .We must educate the people about this to not to fall these kind of offers