The charts below are a collection of the queries that we have received in the months of June, April and May. They are a representation of the main threats that have been affecting largely people based in India.
The queries received here have been broken down into two types:
Here the victims are contacted by the scammers first. The scammers pretend to be from GooglePay support ,from a courier(bluedart,DTDC etc) or from a telecom company like Airtel and call the victims. They then convince the victims that a payment is pending and that they need to do it on the call itself. The victim is then sent a Google Form or a [phishing]website link where the victim will enter his UPI PIN under some pretext.
The scammers then send a SMS to the victims telling them to forward that SMS to another number. When this is done, this causes the victims UPi ID to be taken over by the scammers completely. This is the most financially damaging scam we have seen, as soon as the scammer takes over the UPI Id of the victim, they always completely clear out the bank accounts linked to that UPI ID.
Even when victims have contacted the banks about this, the banks have been clueless in a couple of cases and completely failed to secure the bank accounts, leading to even more losses.
Here too, we have seen two types of scams occur:
In both of these cases we have been able to help the victims in some way. With the phishing websites, we have informed the victims on what details of theirs have been compromised. With the second one we have been able to inform the victims on how to identify and try to verify the details of the scammer.
Along with all of those we have received singular queries regarding some unique scams: