About 15 days ago, Rajesh (name changed), a globetrotter, received a message on his mobile that Rs.1 lakh was debited from his savings account, when he had actually not used his ATM card for the last 24 hours.
In another case, a person who has accumulated over Rs.8,000 as bonus points on his credit card, received a message that the bonus points has been encashed. In another case, a businessman received a call from a person claiming to be an executive from his bank and the caller said that it was a confidential call pertaining to his credit card.
The caller specified some details that matched with his card and after gaining confidence of the businessman he asked for the OTP (one time password) number, which he divulged and within seven minutes Rs.30,000 was debited from his account.
These were all new cases that have been registered with the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell in the city in the last two months.
The city of Visakhapatnam is seeing a sudden spurt in cyber crime and it last two months, the cell recorded about 140 cases (August 73 and September 67). "In the all the cases there is one common concern. How do the fraudsters know about the details of ones credit or ATM card ? Have the banks data been compromised," questioned Commissioner of Police T. Yoganand.
The question is how a person apart from a banker, come know about ones CVO number, name and address, the expiry date of the card and other confidential details such a bonus points accumulated. It is possible only when a card is cloned or when the data is compromised, said DCP (crimes) Shemushi Bajpai.
This year, there has been a rise in the cyber crime cases and so far the cell has recorded about 409 cases, when in the entire last year the number of cases recorded stood at 442.
Not only banks, but there has been cases where people have been duped on the E-Wallet platform and online purchase and sale sites. We have written to the DGP to take up the matter with the RBI, as data compromise cannot be tackled at our level, informed Mr. Yoganand.
A majority of cases pertained to SBI account holders, as customer base of the bank is the widest, especially after the merger of banks.
According to Ms. Shemushi, most of the banks outsource the data entry operation for its card business and that appears to be the crux of all problems. "There is no antecedent verification or background check on the outsourced employees and there are chances of data compromise," she said.
With the economy going cashless, online platforms, E-Wallets, online bank transactions, card transactions and payment Apps will be used more extensively. In such a scenario, we need to strengthen our security systems to keep fraudsters at bay. And it is advisable to use the virtual keyboard and virtual cards over the conventional ones, as they are more secure. And we quickly need to migrate from the magnetic chip model to dynamic cryptography, said Ms. Shemushi.