My bank seems to have lost their shit. In a span of 6 months they’ve probably sent me the “Don’t share your OTP with anyone” message some six million times! Excuse the exaggeration, but it is a tad bit annoying, okay? OTP, CVV, are not to be shared, bank employees will never ask for them over phone, beware of fraudsters and scammers… we’ve all read/heard these warnings about online banking to death. Or have we?
Despite banks and law authorities putting forth so many warnings in place, innocent folk are still getting scammed of lakhs of rupees, only because of ignorance of basic online banking literacy.
Take the case of this woman from Nerul, Navi Mumbai who was looted of nearly ₹ 7 lakh of her hard-earned money. How? Because she shared her OTP not once bu 28 times with a scamster!
40-year-old Tasneem Mujjakkar Modak had ₹ 7.20 lakh in her account. What she didn’t have was any knowledge of online banking. Probably why when warnings about sharing one’s OTP with anyone online were sent out to her, they fell on blind eyes and deaf ears.
On May 17, Tasneem received a call from a fraudster who pretended to be a banker, informing her that her debit card had been blocked “due to technical reasons”.
Now, we all know how this script goes right? If you don’t pay attention, because this could happen to you too.
The fraudster then proceeded to ask Tasneem for her bank details, viz, her 16-digit debit card number, the name on the card, her CVV number and the OTP that the bank sent via SMS to her phone. Clueless and concerned about her blocked debit card, Tasneem shared it all. And that’s when her ordeal began.
Over the course of one week, the fraudster managed to extract the OTP some 28 times from Tasneem, swindling her of a total of ₹ 6,98,973. Her bank balance was reduced from ₹7 lakh to a little over ₹1000.
According to what the police told TOI, the fraudster used three SIM cards to contact Tasneem. The transactions were carried out in multiple cities—Mumbai, Kolkata, Noida, Gurugram, and Bengaluru.
Incidents like these are a huge wake up call to everyone who dismisses their bank’s warnings about sharing OTPs or the need to educate themselves about the nitty-gritties of online banking.
This particularly holds true for middle-aged and senior citizens, who urgently need to be taught how to deal with such scam calls.
Remember, no bank will ever call you and ask for your OTP or other details. They already have those in their system. If you ever receive any such calls, tell them to call you, call your bank on their customer service helpline and check if the call came from them. Chances are, it didn’t and you have a fraudster on your hands. If the fraudster does call back, refuse to provide them details.
Prevention is better than regret, right? I know I won’t be ignoring those warning messages from my bank anymore. And you shouldn’t too.