General Discussion

I received a text message from the government stating that I was yet to pay my taxes, but I knew that I’d already done so. Turns out it was a scam so I deleted the message.

An international transaction of a little less than INR 3,00,000 was being undertaken using my credit card. Since in internation transactions (at least some of them), there is no OTP that comes, I would ordinarily not have realised it. Thanks to the HDFC monitoring team who reached out to me in real time for verification of whether I was undertaking the transaction and upon my denial stopping the transaction from occurring. Since that day, I keep my international transactions off and only activate it when I am either undertaking one or travelling to another country.

Increasingly, people are creating fake WhatsApp / Telegram groups and are posting fraudulent messages by impersonating private equity funds and, or, its partner(s) and/or holding themselves out as affiliated to such private equity fund. These messages state that an official of the private equity fund will share daily market information and trading tactics and promise monetary bonus upon joining the group or state that the private equity fund is seeking individual investors. Lot of people end up investing into fake groups and lose money.

I've been getting persistent calls from a group claiming to be employees of a prominent insurance company. They claimed that i had an old policy with the company that has expired and that the accumulated funds were due to me. They demanded that i whatsapp them my credentials and bank account details. It alarmed me when checking my records, I found that I'd never purchased such a policy. When they called next, I demanded to know more about the company, with which I had dealt in a professional capacity in the past. This alerted them to being discoverer and they stopped calling or receiving my calls.

In India, law warrants such fraudulent calls/ literature to be reported to Cert-In, though the success rate of discovery remain abysmal.

Given the long waiting period for US visa appointment, there are scammers in telegram groups that promise to get you an earlier slot in exchange of money. They generally offer to do it at a low price and on the basis that payment is to be made after the earlier slot has been received. As a consequence of which many people agree to provide their login credentials to these scammers who then change the details and demand a higher amount to simply return the account to the original applicant. Since the applicant would have already paid an amount between INR 15K-INR 20K as part of the application cost, they generally agree to pay the scammers and get back control of the account. I was offered a similar deal but thanks to being aware of this; I refused to engage further.