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From fake wine stores who claim they will deliver your bottle of booze after you’ve made an online payment to shopping websites that look totally legit but are actually fake fronts to lure customers into feeding in their card details, India is so infamous for an entire industry of card scams, there’s even a show about it.
Cyber crimes have been on the rise in India, and a 2019 survey even found that 50 percent of Indians fall prey to scammers. Now, new data reveals that between October to December 2019, India lost Rs 128 crore over card and online fraud. Scheduled banks in the country reported that a fraud took place every six minutes, and more than 21,401 people bought the bullshit and ended up losing big money.
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According to the Reserve Bank of India data, the highest amount of money was swindled from ATMs and people using their debit cards to withdraw cash. This scam, usually done by using an ATM skimmer that is placed on top of the part that scans your card that then records your details, saw 11,508 people lose about Rs 94.5 crore collectively. After that, credit card fraud was the second biggest scam, with 6,117 cases losing Rs 19.7 crore, and net banking scams that stole Rs 13.6 crore from 3,866 people. In fact, the estimated loss in these scams from April to December 2019 is Rs 547 crore, and most of these scams are done through phishing, hacking or convincing someone to give up their details.
Just like most of the misinformation out there, when it comes to online scams, it’s important to be alert if someone is messing around. That means, don’t buy into that chainmail bullshit, use cash on delivery options whenever possible, and use a website authenticity checker like urlvoid before you swiftly enter all your credit card details. Save all the swiping for dating apps, not online scams.Follow Shamani Joshi on Instagram.