Mumbai: A 70-year-old retired MTNL employee was left baffled when she learned that Rs12.73 lakh had been siphoned from her bank accounts in a span of one month in over 30 transactions.
The woman told the police that she had not shared any information about her bank, neither clicked any link nor downloaded any app on her phone, yet the money got stolen.
Random money debit messages
According to the police, the victim is a resident of Ambernath. On July 8, at 11.49am, the victim received a transaction alert on her phone informing that Rs5,000 had been withdrawn from her pension account. Since it was a bank holiday, she did not go to the bank. The next day, the woman again received a message saying that Rs2,000 had been debited. On July 10 the victim visited her bank, but since the server was down, she could not get her passbooks updated.
Two days later, when the victim’s son visited the bank to update the passbooks, he was shocked to learn that between June 8 and July 9, Rs12.73 lakh had got debited from his mother’s three accounts in over 30 transactions. When he asked about these transactions, the bank told him to file a police complaint.
The son then informed his mother, who approached the police last week and filed a report.
The victim has given details of the beneficiary accounts into which the money had got transferred. A case has been registered under Section 66D (cheating by personation by using computer resource) of the Information Technology Act. The police are now investigating how the fraudster got access to the accounts.
FPJ Cyber Secure |
