I had only heard about hackers till now, but experiencing hacking of my account was something which swept the floor beneath away, had it been my personal email account or social networking account, it would still not matter to this degree, but this concerns hacking of my savings bank account.
Last Saturday, I received a call from a guy named Abhinav from ICICI bank, he knew my name and my phone number, which I am sure is not at all difficult to find out in today’s time. He said that I have already activated the online security services through e-mail by sending one-time password (it triggered at the same time, I haven’t done any such thing) and now I have to activate security for phone banking also through the one time password which bank will send me on Monday (another pop-up, if bank has to send an sms on Monday, why is it calling and alerting on Saturday). I listened and said Ok without caring much about the call or its details.
The call came again on Monday morning, but this time it was a guy with the name of Rahul Sharma, he reminded me of my conversation with his colleague which happened on Saturday. I said ok again but this time with doubts about this call and waiting for the sms. Nemesis fell, when I received this sms, it mentioned some guy with the name of Paresh K Mohanta has been registered as a Payee and I have to confirm him using the URN number mentioned in the sms. Had I been a novice or not done an internet banking, I might have fallen in the trap. Being a finance professional, I know what a payee means.
After getting the message, I immediately called ICICI bank, informed the customer care about the fraud which had happened, upon which he immediately deactivated my internet banking and said I can apply for the same after a week.
Now came a big question, how did this guy got my internet banking user id and password, I am not the one who shares it with anyone, neither had I done any transaction in a cyber café. Either this guy is a big time hacker or some employee of ICICI, from where he could possibly get the details. Since the possibility of getting the details from bank is almost equal to the possibility of getting details from someplace else. I registered a complaint about fraud with the bank, gave them every detail of this unknown person I had, his false name, his phone number and the person in whose name he wanted to transfer the money.
But to my surprise, the complaint was not registered. They did not give me any complaint number which every bank give when we place any request or complain for future correspondence. Instead the bank bluntly passed the blame to me saying I had shared my details with someone or used internet banking in an unprotected network.
If the biggest private bank in India is taking no action against the fraud, possibly being done by one of its employee. How can we ensure that our money is safe.
I also googled later, the phone number from which this guy had called. It seems this guy had been successful in his devious act earlier, he had already robbed few people off few lakhs.
I would like to caution you all of this fraud guy who can call any of you. The number from which he called me is 8698741405, there can be other numbers also which he might be using for this.
