Please share your OTP, ma'am'. You know no one is supposed to ask you this, but you shared anyway because you were distracted, busy, anxious, tired - not thinking clearly - and got conned by the fraudster at the other end of the line.
But don't succumb to the shock. If you react quickly, all isn't lost.
Vikram Singh (58), a businessman and resident of Sector 120, Noida, was cheated of Rs 17.8 lakh in September 2021. It started with a text that his Airtel SIM would expire unless he got a 'KYC' (know your customer) verification done. "A couple of hours after the text, I got a call from a person, who claimed to be an Airtel representative and told me my SIM would get deactivated without a KYC," Singh said. The caller also asked him to download an app and pay Rs 10 as processing fee.
Busy with work, Singh followed the instructions without a second thought. But he likely downloaded a remote access-provider app, which allowed the caller to take control of his phone. "After I downloaded the app, the caller asked me to keep my phone aside while he updated the KYC. After a while, I picked up my phone and found the caller had access to my phone and was deleting some messages. I tried to speak to him, but he disconnected. When I called back, the number wasn't reachable," Singh said. Those were alerts from his bank about the account withdrawals that were deleted.
"I immediately called 1930. They asked for basic details and I received a message on my phone to register a police complaint simultaneously," he said. Singh spent a nervous month before the call he was restless for came. His money had been recovered.
In a similar incident, a retired CISF personnel, Ajay Kumar, was cheated of Rs 6.7 lakh in January this year. He called 1930 immediately too. Kumar had made a mistake many do - he had Googled for his bank's customer care number and followed the search results without double-checking, landing in the arms of cons. "When I called the number, a person identifying as the bank representative spoke to me. He convinced me to download a mobile app to help him start my internet banking facility. Soon after I downloaded it, Rs 6.7 lakh was gone," Kumar said. It took a while, but Kumar got his money back in April. Meanwhile, two arrests related to the fraud were made in Meerut.
With financial cyber crime cases leaping up annually, an ecosystem to fight it with technology and guile has also been taking shape, across states. Fraudsters will likely escape with your money by taking out cash or making online purchases if investigators fail to freeze it quickly. So, just as the golden hour is critical for accident victims, quick reporting is significant for those who have been swindled through electronic channels.
Building the network
This was the driving force behind the launch of the 1930 helpline in April 2021, which has since been building a counter-con network in which police, banks and wallet operators stay plugged in to pluck your stolen money from the maze it gets channelled into before vanishing into digital ether. The 1930 helpline has a 70-80% success rate if a fraud is reported within the first two hours - the 'golden hours'. Beyond this, success rates are low, just 15-20%, according to its operators.
Nearly all states have set up or are setting up their units to receive calls on 1930, in line with a mandate from the Union home ministry. Earlier, a complainant would register a case about a cyber fraud and the police would then look for the final beneficiary of the money. It was a long, time-taking process," said a senior official associated with home ministry.
And retrieving the money would be nearly impossible. "By the time investigators knew about the final beneficiary, the defrauded money would have already exited the digital ecosystem. It was either taken out as cash or used to purchase something or pay for something online," the official added. "It became clear that if investigators could track the money trail and instruct the last intermediary (like a payment gateway or wallet) to stop the transaction, the police could recover the defrauded money."
Among the first movers in setting up a coordinated response mechanism to financial cyber crimes was Madhya Pradesh Police, which formed a WhatsApp group that brought together nodal and cyber cell officers and executives of different banks, wallets and payment gateways.
"In the group, an officer would inform the first intermediary of the defrauded money about the complaint. Initially, officers stopped some transactions this way. The group slowly started to grow, but the main issue was that it was voluntary. There was no escalation method, and people were not bound to reply. Everything got done in good faith," the MHA official said.
There are two other problems. If, say, the money got transferred from Paytm to Airtel payments bank, and a representative from the latter was not part of the group, the tracking hit a dead end. And when it had to be tracked in other states, cops from that state had to be tapped. But there was no mechanism for it.
So, before the pandemic struck in 2020, Anyesh Roy, former DCP of Delhi Police's cyber cell proposed setting up a webpage that would act as a platform for different entities and states to work in a coordinated manner against cybercriminals, at a state coordination meeting that included RBI representatives,
Roy took the idea to the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre of MHA, and in January 2020, a meeting was called with several entities. Some banks and wallets agreed to join the initiative. An app was developed, and after a trial run, it was officially launched in Delhi on April 1, 2021. Other states joined, expanding the network to create a helpline and platform that worked countrywide. Officials said the push came from the top with Union home minister Amit Shah asking them to prioritise the initiative so that victims of cyber fraud don't have to keep making the rounds of police stations.
Stopping a fraud
Triveni Singh, SP (cyber cell), UP Police, said after receiving a complaint on the helpline, details like account number, the amount lost, card details, transaction ID, etc, are noted and a token is generated.
The immediate intermediary, be it a bank, wallet, or merchant, is alerted to freeze the transaction. If the money has already flowed on to other channels, the 'stop transaction' alert travels through the chain till it is stopped.
The complainant gets an SMS with a reference number and a link to www.cybercrime.gov.in. "Once the victim registers a complaint on the national cybercrime portal, police proceedings will follow to retrieve and revert the money into the victim's account and trace the fraudster," Singh said. Since the formation of the UP unit in May 2021, it has received 74,483 calls to date. "On an average, the 1930 helpline number is now getting 190-200 calls daily. Since May 2021, we have recovered over Rs 12.84 crore swindled from residents across the state," Singh said. Most of the complaints come from Gautam Budh Nagar (Noida), followed by Ghaziabad, Lucknow, Kanpur and Prayagraj.
Sources in the cyber cell said they can be more effective if they have more manpower.
