Victims of online fraud, Question safety of bank account data

With people still recovering from ransomware attacks, Bangalore recently witnessed an attack on people's financial data. At least 25 complaints have been reported to the cyber cell of the city police in the past two days. In all, they lost about Rs 15 lakhs.

The police, however, are as lost and clueless as the victims of online fraud. Security experts said that there was the possibility the financial database of the victims had been leaked into the Dark Web. Since the details of the seller (victim's bank details) and a buyer who transact through bitcoins on Dark Web remain anonymous or untraceable, the police have a tough time arresting the accused.

"The accused have used skimmer trick to cheat the victims. The modusoperandi used by the accused in all the cases are similar," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Jinendra Khanagavi said.
Debit card skimming is a type of a debit card theft where the accused uses a small device to steal the card information.

When the card is swiped through the skimmer, the device captures and stores all the details stored in the card's magnetic strip. After the customer leaves, the accused creates a duplicate card and cheats the victim

Christopher, a software developer who has lost Rs 15,000, suspects that the accused could have installed a software in the ATM kiosks to steal data from the credit & debit cards."Since I swipe the card even in other bank's ATM kiosks, one ATM kiosk cannot be pointed out. The police on their part is clueless about how the fraudsters operate. The bank on the other side will not entertain unless there is a formal police complaint made," he added.

The victims are card holders of private and even nationalised banks. Nearly 20 people approached the cyber sleuths and most of them were all residents of Hennur.

All the victims have lost their money almost during the same time in the midnight of Sunday.

Shubhamangala Sunil, an expert in cyber forensic and cyber law said that it's high time that the customers should ask their bank about how safe is their data. "In most cases, there are possibilities that there could be internal data leakage. The customers' data is available in the bank's branch office or the main server. The accused can even hackvictims the main servers and steal the data. The customers should the ATM pins under extreme confidentiality," Shubhamangala added.