From the last many weeks, I have been approached by many of my customers at the bank branch where I am posted about their bank accounts going empty. After checking the same, the customers have become the victims of the online fraudsters (online beggars, as I call them) who grab the bank account details of the account holders by a motivational force and decamp with the money, online. After receiving such complaints from my ‘poor’ and ‘horrified’ customers, I instantly debit freeze their accounts coupled with the hot marking of their Debit/Credit Cards.
Welcome to the world of Vishing (also known as phone or voice Phishing). It is a technique aimed at directly attacking your bank accounts and thus making it empty. It is usually done by a phone call from a person who pretends to be a bank representative or from the technical team of the bank. Vishing is different from phising on the basis that the latter is carried out via emails. It is also different from Smishing where SMSs are used to launch a cyber attack on your bank account.
Vishing is carried out via a phone call. The phone caller tries to fetch the required information from a bank account holder by getting the Credit/debit card number, three-digit CVV number on the flip side of the card, expiry date, Secure password, ATM pin, internet Banking login ID and password and other personal information. Remember that CVV Number (Card Verification Value) also called as CSC Number (Card Security Code) is a 3-digit number on the back side of your debit/credit card. This number is NOT the PIN of your card.
Kindly remember that if you lost your ATM or Credit Card, you also lose the money of that plastic card as well. ATM or credit card number and expiry date mentioned on the front side of the card and CVV number of the flip side is enough for most internet merchants to execute the online transactions. Pertinently, I have personally lost Rs 66,248.59 from my credit card account while doing a time pass on internet where I was browsing a trading company called ExpertOption. I put my required information where I was asked to invest $1,000 for doing trading like Credit Card number, Name, Expiry Date and flip side three-digit CVV number. I then stopped at giving the transaction password to avoid the transaction go successful. I exited. In a few minutes, I got a message wherein amount of Rs 66,248.59 got debited from my credit card. Hurried and worried, I ringed up my friends and narrated the same out of my embarrassment manner to them. Later, one of my friends confirmed me that I am gone. I told him that I didn’t enter the password, but alas, the transaction had gone executed. I could have little regrets for my financial damage but my regrets and frustration was very heavy as being a banker. Such a financial loss was my sheer unawareness. Though I have confronted the loss, YOU MUST NOT.
As per Reserve Bank of India report, a loss of more than Rs 12,000 crore in 2014-15 was incurred by banks on account of overall frauds. This was up from a loss of Rs 7,542 crore in the previous year.
A total of 27,614 reports of frauds related to credit cards have been reported from April 2011 to September 2014. Between the same period, a total of 3835 such frauds were reported from debit card usages. Plus, 1,969 cases executed through internet-banking have also been reported by the regulator.
The possible way to escape a cyber attack is NOT to respond to phone calls, emails, URLs, SMSs etc. Keep your all the credentials with you. Nevertheless, if you somehow have disclosed some of the credentials to the spammer, immediately change your passwords etc. Also keep a vigil on the pop-up windows where you must not put any kind of personal information. If you want to access your bank account via internet, remember to type the URL in address bar of the browser. In order to play safer, avoid accessing the net banking accounts from cyber cafes where computers are mostly used by multiple people.
Thanks to True Caller Application which is helping people notice the spam calls and thus averting any fraud. Block the (spam) numbers and do share with your family, friends, relatives, neighbors etc be it offline or online, whatever. Disseminating the information via power tool called SOCIAL MEDIA does have a cosmopolitan effect now-a-days.
Sofi Imtiyaz is working in J&K Bank