Man receives multiple blank calls, Rs 50L stolen from account soon after: Report

Most in the country have heard the constant refrain asking to never share your personal information including OTPs and PINs but what if you just get calls but can't hear anything on the other side? Should you be wary of those too?

The answer is, yes, you should.

In Delhi, a few days ago, a director of a security services firm lost Rs 50 lakh to thieves who stole from him just through blank calls, making it one of the biggest cyber crime frauds in terms of value where an individual was targeted from the national capital.

According to a report in The Times of India, the victim received several calls in a span of less than two hours and found several RTGS transaction messages soon after that. The victim said he ignored the calls as he couldn't hear anything on the other side.

Also Read | India: Threatened by Cybergeddon?

About Rs 12 lakh was transferred to one particular account, that of one Bhaskar Mandal, while Rs 10 lakh each went to other accounts and Rs 4.6 lakh was transferred to one Avijit Giri, the report stated.

Cops suspect the scammers may have used a 'SIM swap' technique wherein scamsters find a loophole in the two-factor authentication system in which the second step is a text message or a call to a phone.

“In this fraud, scammers also contact people’s mobile phone carriers and trick them into activating a SIM card. Once this happens, they take control over the phone," an officer told the publication.

“The crooks may also have been listening to the OTPs on phone through a parallel call," another office told TOI. However, they are also probing other angles including a phone hijack.

The TOI report said that masterinds of the con might be based in Jharkhand's Jamtara and those whose accounts the funds were transferred to could have just provide them for a charge or on rent.

This report of fraud comes on the back of a large-scale cyberttack: recently in Delhi, a ransomware attack on the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) left its servers out of service for at least seven days.

A week after the ransomware attack on AIIMS, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) faced around 6,000 hacking attempts within 24 hours on November 30.