Sending alarm bells ringing, the city cyber cell has unearthed a cyber fraud with potential to wreck massive damage. Sleuths said cyber thugs had infiltrated various search engines and inserted their numbers as call centre numbers of several nationalised and private banks and several pay wallets.
What this means is you called up one of the numbers hoping the call centre would help resolve your credit card, debit card or pay wallet issues, you would land right into their web, unwittingly disclosing crucial information to the fraudsters.
“You would become easy prey and your hard-earned money siphoned off from a bank account or pay wallet in minutes,” said a top cyber cell official.
Cyber cell sources said they had been working on the scam for quite a long time and have identified about 53 bogus cell numbers on various search engines and 14 such links. “The numbers have been verified and tracked to scamsters in Jamtara, Jharkhand, and Bihar,” an investigator added.
Sleuths said investigations were on to find out if there were any victims.
A cyber crime investigator said the scamsters use a tool that plugs into the website and enables one to experiment with different ways of adding content. “They also use an algorithm through which one can manipulate data,” he added.
Cyber experts said the scamsters also cleverly use search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. “The search engine always shows top results for certain key words and that is where the customer is trapped and ends up getting the fake numbers,” said a cyber expert.