More than 200 persons said to have lost several lakhs of rupees in the four months of this year in hands of Debiut card fraudsters in Hyderabad. Interestingly, such crimes in the entire 2014 are just numbered 61. Around 50 such cases are getting registered every month at Cyber Crime Police Station in Hyderabad.
The modus operandi is very simple in 90% of the cases. The fraudsters call the victims posing as bank executive or the bank’s call centre staff. They extract entire debit or credit card details including the PIN and CVV number in the guise of issuing a new card and then empty the bank account either through online or retail purchases.
In most of the occasions, the callers were from other states, the Police in most cases were confined to trying to get money refunded from the banks or money transaction gateways. The mobile numbers are registered with fake addresses making it impossible to trace. And the other way of duping people is to steal the data of the debit card and PIN by attaching a skimmer to the ATM’s card slot and collecting the pin through the a video camera attached to the ceiling of the ATM center. Police say educating bank account holders is the only way out of this mess for now.
