Vikash Sharma

Bhubaneswar: The cyber criminals are on the prowl in Odisha and have reportedly swindled over Rs 10 lakh in the last three days, informed Bhubaneswar DCP Umashankar Dash on Wednesday.

While talking to reporters, the Bhubaneswar DCP informed that the newly set up Cybercrime Helpdesk is getting flooded with calls from people who are reporting several cases of online frauds.

“In the last three days, we have received around 50 calls from Bhubaneswar and another 70 calls from outside the Smart City,” said Dash.

According to Dash, it has been found that the cyber criminals are mostly committing two types of frauds- through Unified Payments Interface (UPI) or through malicious links/ messages.

Similarly, the cyber fraudsters are also targeting people through ATM debit or credit cards via OTP. The criminals are fraudulently withdrawing money from the bank accounts of gullible people by several tricks and malicious links or messages.

Apart from this, the Commissionerate Police has also received complaints from some people that they got duped soon after they called up authorised customer care centers of banks seeking emergency help on credit or debit cards.

He further said, “A person has alleged to have called up one such customer care for cancelling credit card. After knowing the procedure, the customer again got a call from another person who then directed him to share the OTP sent on his mobile phone for completing the process of cancelling the credit card. Later, money was fraudulently debited from his account.”

"We are suspecting that the fraud might have been committed through any software or app or the data was leaked from the call centre itself. Our investigation in this connection is still underway,” Dash added.

(Edited By Pradeep Singh)

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