While the authorities are busy battling the menace of vishing (voice phishing) and credit card cloning, cyber fraudsters have come up with a new technique to dupe victims by virtually cloning their SIM card to siphon off money from their bank account.
A 31-year-old South Mumbai woman, Lubaina Kapasi, fell prey to the fraud, losing Rs 24,000 after her card was cloned, or more accurately, swapped.
The MRA Marg police have registered an FIR against the fraudster and are investigating the matter.
According to the complaint filed by Kapasi, a PR professional, she had received a call on May 14 from a person claiming to be from her phone service provider's call centre. He told her that she had been sent an SMS with a 20-digit verification code which she needed to forward to the customer care, or else her number would be disconnected as per their verification procedure.
Kapasi, thinking it was a genuine call, forwarded the number she had received to customer care. Within five minutes of this, her SIM was deactivated.
Kapasi went to the service centre of the telecom operator and narrated the incident, and was surprised to learn that the caller was not an employee of the company.
"My SIM card was activated by the service centre, and I heaved a sigh of relief. But later, when I checked my bank balance, I found that all the money in my account had been transferred via two transaction. When I checked with the bank, they said that they had received a request from my number to change my netbanking password. They told me they had complied with the request, following which the two transactions took place," Kapasi told DNA.
"I was shocked when I was listening to them. It was unbelievable. It is a good thing that my account did not have a lot of money, otherwise the fraudster would have siphoned off all of it," she added.
According to cyber experts, since the mobile number is linked with banking transactions, it has become easy for fraudsters to siphon off money.
“The con is called SIM cloning, and uses SIM swapping technique using which the fraudsters can access your SIM card, duplicate it, and take money from your bank account,” said Shubham Singh, a cyber expert. “One should be careful while sending anything from their mobile number to anyone.”
NEW SCAM IN TOWN
- SIM swap: A con man registers a client’s phone no. with a new SIM card that is in his possession.
- This is done by sending an SMS with SIM PIN to the client and asking them to send it to customer care.
- All OTPs, passwords can thus be intercepted.
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