The Bombay High Court has rejected a petition by the ICICI Bank seeking stay on adjudicating an officer’s order to pay compensation to two persons who lost Rs5.41 lakh in online phishing attack.
Ramdas Pawar and Sourabh Jain, both residents of Pune, had moved the special court of state’s adjudicating officer, in 2011 for compensation.
In September-October 2010, Rs3.39 lakh were illegally transferred from the accounts of Pawar. Similarly, Jain lost Rs2.02 lakh in October 2010. Pawar had account with the Bank’s Bund Garden Road branch while Jain had account in Shivajinagar branch. Both of them had lodged police complaints but the accused remained untraceable.
Pawar and Jain’s lawyer Gaurav Jachak argued before the adjudicating officer that as per the Information Technology Act, it is mandatory for the bank to pay a compensation.
The bank submitted to the court that “both the complainants had responded to phishing emails (asking about personal data) sent by fraudsters, and became victims of the online attack”. The case should have been against the beneficiaries of the transaction and not the bank, the bank argued.
In February, the adjudicating officer Rajesh Agarwal passed the order in the complainants’ favour and ordered the bank to pay Rs1.5 lakh to Jain and Rs3 lakh to Pawar. The officer also ordered Idea Cellular to pay Rs25,000 to Jain for not following security practices before issuing duplicate SIM to another person.
The bank moved the Bombay High Court. However, the High Court upheld adjucating officer’s judgment and rejected the bank’s petition and then review petition.