Ring of fraud

Saheli Mitra checks out the plethora of scam messages hitting the inboxes of mobile phone subscribers and tells you how to avoid being duped

If you are a mobile phone subscriber, you may have received messages like these on your phone. They bring happy tidings — telling you that you have won a king’s ransom at some mysterious lottery you have never heard of or participated in. However, as many people have found out to their grief, such messages are nothing but skilful and elaborate scams — meant to make you poorer rather than richer.

Surabhi Sen, a Calcutta homemaker, fell victim to one such fantastic sms. When she responded to it, she was given a State Bank of India account number and asked to deposit a sum of Rs 15,000 as “transaction fee” for processing and remitting her prize money. Once she paid up, the scamsters took off with the money, and that was the last she had heard of her alleged winnings.

Indian mobile phone users are being flooded with scam smses like these. They come in various forms — lottery wins, employment opportunities, offers to work from home or to get admission at reputed universities abroad. If you respond to these messages, you are looking for trouble. You will invariably be asked to pay an amount under the pretext that it’s a transaction fee, or a registration fee or a processing or clearing fee. You will be persuaded to deposit it in an Indian bank account. Once the money is deposited, it is either withdrawn immediately or fresh demands for higher amounts are made with such messages as “The delivery will not commence unless the courier charges are paid”. And if you happen to be so gullible as to reveal your bank account details, the fraudsters can misuse the information in many ways — starting from identity theft to cleaning up your account.

“The only way to stop this vicious network is by making consumers aware of the modus operandi of these scams,” says C.L. Nag, general manager, foreign exchange department, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Calcutta.

The RBI has been trying to get all banks to hold awareness programmes, urging customers not to reveal their bank account details in response to phone messages or to unauthorised persons. “We held two awareness drives at Howrah and Sealdah stations in Calcutta earlier this month to make people aware of these frauds. But we need to hold these drives in semi urban and rural areas too where awareness is pretty low,” says Nag.

A cyber crime official in Calcutta agrees. “Account holders in rural areas are specially targeted as they are easy to dupe and end up giving their bank account details.”

Even calling back the number provided in these scam smses is fraught with danger. For the sms may be twinned with premium rate service frauds where the number is connected to a recorded message and the call is billed at a very high rate.

Indeed, the scam may run even without a luscious lottery win bait. Journalist Purabi Kar got two missed calls from an unknown number recently. She called the number back — without noticing that it had an international code — listened to a recorded voice that made little sense and after a few seconds, hung up. She soon got a message from her service provider that she has been charged Rs 100 for the call that lasted 23 seconds. An Internet check on the number (43820946022) threw up many posts by others who had received missed calls from the same number or a number in the same series and had been charged Rs 100 when they called the number back. Clearly, this is some kind of a revenue generating exercise being carried out at the expense of clueless Indian mobile phone users.

So if telecom subscribers have become fair game for different types of scams, what are the service providers doing about it? As consumer activist Bejon Misra points out, “Major telecom companies should try and stop such activities. How do these conmen get hold of consumers’ cell numbers and send these bulk smses?”

However, telecom service providers such as Vodafone Essar and Airtel hold that they never share any customer information. “We take customer confidentialty very seriously and have safeguards to ensure that customer numbers are not shared with third party marketing agencies,” says a spokesperson for Vodafone Essar. “However, a customer’s number can be easily accessed through avenues like customer references used at restaurants, shops etc,” he adds. Vodafone regularly urges customers to ignore such fraudulent messages through emails, says the spokesperson.

Others like Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, Bharti Airtel, feel that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) needs to step in to tackle the phone scam menace. “Trai must also impose greater penalties for calling or messaging consumers who have subscribed to the Do Not Call Registry (DNCR). Unlike the West, offenders in India are not penalised adequately. For example, in the US, for the first violation, the penalty is around $11,000 per call and this goes up substantially for successive violations,” he adds.

A government official with an inside track on the telecom sector reveals that most of these scam messages are sent from within India. “Very rarely do we find a scam that originates from outside the country, which is a more serious concern. However, some new telecom regulations are supposed to come in soon, and once those come into effect, most of these problems will be solved,” says the official.

Frighteningly, if you do happen to fall victim to an sms scam, you could be hauled up under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) 1999. “Under this law, sending foreign remittances in any form for participation in lottery schemes, or for securing prize money / awards is a crime,” says Alok Kumar Mitra, senior criminal lawyer, Calcutta High Court.

Also, a bank account holder becomes party to criminal activity if he allows someone to use his account for committing frauds. In such cases, his account may be frozen and he may be prosecuted.

So don’t, under any circumstances, respond to any of these tempting messages. Remember, they are just a ruse to get you to part with your hard-earned money.