Why insurance is a must for cyber security now
₹2 to her account on the pretext of a test transaction. Once the receipt was acknowledged, he initiated another transaction to remit the list price. This time, however, it was a ‘collect’ transaction rather than ‘pay’.
All of this happened without disconnecting the call and by creating a high sense of urgency. The victim entered the UPI PIN in a hurry. So, the amount got charged to the account instead of getting deposited.
As soon as she realized this, she protested. The buyer unhesitatingly apologized and promised to pay double – the original amount and the amount wrongly charged. And sent another collect transaction.
This time, the victim figured out what was going on and hung up the phone. Apart from the monetary loss, such incidents make the victims of such frauds wonder if some of the digital platforms are partly culpable, be it due to negligence resulting in the leak of credit card numbers and other information. Unfortunately, these occurrences are not rare.
When these individuals walked into the cyber-crime police station to report their crimes, the attitude of the agencies was casual. It was a routine affair. Their amounts were dismissed as meagre as the busy personnel were fighting much larger frauds.
They blamed the victim for not following Reserve Bank of India’s adage of ‘jaankar baniye satark rahiye’. Their complaints were noted and then dismissed. The credit card issuing bank refused to reverse the transaction, even though the incident was reported within an hour.
This despite there being a lag in credit card settlement compared to UPI. The classified site routinely identifies some sellers as suspicious on their site and warns the customer of dealing with them. But that’s about it.
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