A 32-year-old techie from Seegehalli in Bengaluru East was bugged by repeated calls from unknown numbers for about two weeks on the pretext of returning his missed calls. He was preoccupied by either ignoring the calls or receiving them.
About 20 days ago, the techie received a call when a person on the other side rang for the second time. The caller, who spoke in Hindi, said he had received a missed call from the techie’s number. The techie responded to him saying he did not call and ignored the incident.
But a few minutes later his phone rang again and this time it was a different number. He answered the call and the caller said the same to which he responded he did not give the missed call. The techie, although a little surprised, did not take it seriously.
The techie was fed up seeing multiple calls from unknown numbers on the first day till 11 p.m. This continued the next day. Perturbed by the calls, he started to ignore them, but he still got multiple calls from the same number forcing him to take the call. This went on for two weeks. When customer care did not come to his rescue, he filed a complaint at Whitefield CEN police station on August 8. For the last three days, the calls have stopped, he said.
He also realised that he was not the only one who received such calls. Another person whom he met at the police station came with the same complaint. A telecom company informed another victim that his number may have been impersonated by cyber criminals and they were calling these numbers to dupe targets.
The cyber police said it was a case of spoofing. There are multiple apps where one can mask the original number with another number. The fraudsters have multiple contact numbers in the database and they randomly select some number and put it on application. The number the fraudsters put on the app reflects on the other person’s phones whom they are calling to dupe. The original number gets masked. This trend is on the surge. The people whose number was used get missed calls from callers who were targeted by the fraudsters, the police said.
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