MUMBAI: You can now lose your hard earned money by dialing a fake customer care number taken from Google. As scammers become more sophisticated in their techniques to defraud consumers, this phishing fraud Manipulates the consumer to dial the conman and not vice versa.
The trick of fraudsters is to interfere with the customer care numbers of reputed companies and financial institutions on the internet to mislead consumers into calling them.
This is done in many ways. The most common method is where thieves modify a company’s customer care coordinates on Google and use SEO to push their fake number to the top of search results. Most consumers look for customer service coordinates of a service provider on Google when they want to file a complaint with the latter. Fraud takes advantage of this basic nature of consumers.
Not just the Google search engine, the fraud also replaces the original contact coordinates of popular retail stores and banks on Google Maps with their own.
Twitter and Facebook are the other two mediums where fraud coordinates with customer service. They closely follow complaints being raised by consumers on Twitter and promptly respond to those posts with their fake numbers.
Another way fraud industries create blogs, such as on e-commerce purchases, on platforms such as Medium, and by posting bogus numbers as customer care coordinates of companies in that industry.
preventing and reporting fraud
Most of the big companies and banks have verified Facebook, Twitter handles, so the Twitter handle that reacted to the post should pay attention.
Most importantly, do not share banking details, such as card number, CVV, ATM PIN, banking password and one-time-password (OTP) with anyone over the phone under any circumstances. As a common practice, no bank and reputed companies ask their customers for confidential details over phone or email.
Last week, State Bank of India (SBI) tweeted a video alerting its consumers about such scams. “Beware of fraudulent customer care numbers. Please visit the official website of SBI for correct customer care number. Refrain from sharing confidential banking information with anyone,” tweeted SBI.
If you become a victim of online scams and lose money, write to your bank immediately. Most of the banks have listed their toll-free helpline numbers on their respective
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