Manipur residents are passing anxious days as fraudsters who are wizards of digital technology are targeting the public and siphoning money from their bank accounts.
Many complaints in this regard have been lodged with the State Cyber Crime Police department but most of the cyber criminals are hard to track and the money stolen fraudulently is difficult to recover, according to a report in ifp.co.in.
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The modus operandi of such cyber criminals are many and the most used technique is to contact a person thorough mobile phones and claiming that the caller is from State Bank of India (SBI) bank, the caller will then state some personal information culled from banking systems and pretend that there is some problem with the account of the victim that they target.
They say that the debit card is about to expire and that they will facilitate the corrections.
The report quoted officer-in- charge of cyber crime police station, John Ningombam as saying that the public needs to be aware of such fraudsters and never divulge personal bank details to any caller.
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There are other methods used by the criminals saying that the target whom they choose has won a lottery from purchasing something online and whether one wants a car or jewellery or cash, some charges have to be paid for transport etc.
There are others who use fake profile pictures of attract individuals and make then friends on Facebook.
In matter of time, the fake friend will tell the target that he or she is getting some costly gifts and even send a picture of it being gift-wrapped.
After some time the target would be told that the gift has been sent.
Moments later a call comes from someone posing as from Immigration service saying and that the parcel has to be taxed for import.
Then, the fee will be demanded and if paid, the money will be taken out from an ATM by the fraudsters and the facebook friend and the gift disappear. There have been many accounts of such victims in the State.
Another style of duping people in rural areas and hill districts is that some call will come to the person that a mobile phone tower will be erected by using a popular name like Jio, Airtel, etc.
The caller says that people will come and scrutiny the land and after saying that the land is verified for the mobile tower process, demand some money for clearance charges or to pay bribe money to officials to get the process completed quickly.