Cyber Fraud: Man Loses More Than Rs 2 Lakh While Booking Cab Online In Maharashtra. Check What Happened

The cyber fraud was reported when a person from Maharashtra, who works as a software engineer, was booking a cab online to go to Nashik.

Cyber Fraud Latest Update: In the recent past, more cases of cyber frauds have been reported in India. In the latest case, a software engineer was duped for more than Rs 2 lakh while he was booking travel through a website online. A person from Maharashtra, who works as a software engineer, was booking a cab online to go to Nashik. While booking the cab he added all information on the travel agency’s website and initiated the payment. However, the booking failed due to a technical glitch on the website.

“The complainant had furnished his details to the agency in an email on the website of the travel agency but failed to book the cab due to a technical glitch,” Times of India quoted police as saying.

After some time, the software engineer received a call from a man who introduced him as Rajat and identified himself as an employee of the same travel agency. The employee then assured him to help with his booking for a cab. Taking further the booking process, the employee asked him to make a payment of Rs 100 on the travel website again and said that the rest of the payment could be paid after the trip.

However, after the man again tried to make the payment, the website again faced a technical glitch and at the end the victim left the booking as it is without taking the booking process further. However, to his shocking knowledge, a few hours later, he received back-to-back transaction messages from his bank notifying him about a sum of more than Rs 2 lakh being debited from his account.

Police said the man at midnight received a message on his phone that a sum of Rs 81,400, Rs 71,085, and Rs 1.42 lakh had been debited from credit card accounts. After realising that there was something wrong, he contacted the customer care of the banks and asked them to block the credit cards, police added.

Even as the customer care helped the victim bring back his Rs 71,085, he still lost the remaining amount of Rs 2.2 lakh to scammers in cyber fraud. The case at present is under investigation, it did spark a question about how the software engineer got duped.

The incident seems to be a case of pharming. Pharming is a type of cyber-attack where hackers manipulate a website or a computer’s DNS (Domain Name System) server to redirect users directly to a fake or malicious website even if a user types the correct URL.

It means even if somebody doesn’t click on any malicious link and searches through a real website, they can still be redirected to a fake one without them realising. Hackers in this way trick people through these fake websites and make them enter sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or other confidential data.