CHENNAI: It still goes by the name Nigerian scam, but fraudulent mails now come with the RBI governor’s signature or the stamp of the income tax department.
“On behalf of the India Government and United Nations, we wish to notify you as a beneficiary of Rs 2 Crore, 73 Lakhs, 36 Thousand, 500 Rupees (2,73,36,500 INR),” reads the mail which is a bait to get you engaged and later extract your personal and banking details. The mail bears the signature of outgoing RBI governor D Subbarao and ends with the message “In us you can trust” .
A series of such online frauds got the name ‘Nigerian scam’ because the African country was the primary source of such fake e-mails . Police and cyber experts say that criminals have now moved on from asking for advance fee to mails asking for personal details in the name of government agencies and banks.
Last month, Amitabh Bachchan’s son-in-law Nikhil Nanda was cheated into giving his email ID, password and date of birth to a fake Microsoft account. The scamsters hacked two of his email accounts and social network profile and sought money from his contacts.
“We’ve had six or seven such cases of mails forwarded in the name of government agencies in the past two months,” said a senior police officer attached to the Central Crime Branch in Chennai. “Last month, a Villupuram resident lost around Rs3 lakh after he fell for a similar spam.”
RBI spokesperson Alpana Killawala said they had been running awareness campaigns to alert people about this fraud. “We have messages scrolling on our website www.rbi.org. in. We are informing people through FM radio channels and newspaper dvertisements,” she said.
Some such mails seek verification details from the “Income Tax department” and companies asking for refundable deposits. “A person waiting to join an IT company received a mail asking him to pay Rs 1 lakh as refundable deposit. Immediately after the payment was made, the money was withdrawn and there was no more communication,” said the official. “No government agency or bank would ask for personal identifiable information (PII) through e-mail ,’ said cyber forensics expert K Rama Subramaniam.
“They know that at least ten in a million would fall victim,” he said. Citing an example, he said that someone who received a mail from a bank for verification realised it was a fake mail and gave the wrong username and password. The mail still accepted it and asked for the credit card number as the second step.
But once he gave a fake credit card number, the reply came that the number was wrong. “This is because fraudsters have a data base of existing credit card numbers,” said Subramaniam.