South Mumbai man says he hadn’t shared OTP or password with anyone; police doubtful, say fraudsters made purchase on US website
Police officers during a meeting with bank officials last week
The LT Marg police have filed an FIR on a complaint of a 39-year-old businessperson from south Mumbai, who alleged that someone stole his bank account details and made a transaction of $641 (approximately Rs 52,500) on his SBI credit card. As soon as he received a message about the transaction, he contacted the State Bank of India to block the credit card. Later, he received another transaction alert for $588; however, it wasn’t processed because the card had been blocked.
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“I have not clicked on any link or shared my OTP with anyone. I suspect that my account details were stolen by hackers and transactions were made without a password or OTP,” the complainant told mid-day. However, sources in the LT Marg police have expressed doubts on the possibility of unauthorised transactions without sharing of details. They said they are collecting information from the bank for further investigation.
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The police have discovered that fraudsters are using credit card details to purchase electronics through international websites. It then becomes a challenge for the police to obtain transaction details from the foreign sites. An officer noted that similar cases have been reported in the city, with banks taking up to 10-15 days to generate transaction IDs for credit card transactions.
In this case, the fraudster purchased some electronic items from the US website of Philips (philips.com). Since the server is in the US, it would be difficult for the Mumbai police to secure necessary details to probe the matter further, cops said.
For the prevention of such frauds, Joint Commissioner of Police (crime) Satya Narayan Chaudhary along with Additional Commissioner of Police (south region) Dilip Sawant recently held a meeting with bankers to discuss timely information sharing with investigating officers. Sawant said, “The cooperation of banks and sharing of timely information is very important to prevent or detect cyber fraud.”
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