Financial Fraud On Rise, Eastern India Emerge As New Hot Bed: TrustCheckr

NEW DELHI: KYC, fake cash-back, digital wallet frauds, fake-selling, QR codes, UPI phishing, lottery scams, and financial fraud on social media are the most rampant cyber fraud happening in India.

Statistics of TrustCheckr, a fraud data insights and analytics startup shows that in the last 15 months, they found over 1 million frauds in both B2B and B2C, with 25% of scams involving KYC and 20% involving QR codes, and B2B scams involving 30% false identities and 25% synthetic identity frauds.

According to TrustCheckr, the majority of UPI scams occur on payment apps and marketplaces, with eastern India accounting for 41% of fraud distribution: West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar, Assam, Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Himachal Pradesh, and Sikkim.

WATCH: How TrustCheckr Is Helping You From Becoming A Victim Of Online Fraud.

According to the findings of the survey, the top scammers were from Patna, Chandigarh, Kolkata, and Meerut for one of the most common payment apps (15%). Assam is the source of the majority of QR Code scams, accounting for 20% of the overall distribution.

Analysis by TrustCheckr also shows that many of the fraudster profiles claimed to be army men; this is most likely the result of border clashes between India and China, which sparked an increase in patriotic sentiment among the general public, prompting the fraudsters to try to cash in on the sentiment by playing the emotional card. Many QR code scammers pretended to be army men selling something on online marketplaces.

Lack of knowledge and vulnerabilities in sensitive card data are increasing digital frauds, as the pandemic has driven people to lean more toward contactless payments.

The results of TrustCheckr are focused on 350,000 data points gathered from top hashtags, 200+ Twitter handles, partner data shared in the previous 12 months, and TrustCheckr’s patented Social scanning technology.

“The common thread of digital payment frauds is phone number and email address. We check fraud signals with phone/email, validate the customer authenticity using historical fraud trends, fraud data sets, history and provide simple REST APIs with phone numbers as input, integration in less than 48 hours,” said Adhip Ramesh, Founder, TrustCheckr.

Shivraj Harsha, Co-founder, TrustCheckr, warns against callers who agree to pay any price for products. “Digital scams can trick users as they may appear as legitimate by revealing a few authentic details about them in order to earn their trust and move money. If it sounds too good to be true, one should be careful about such transactions. Our score parameters can give a go-ahead or early warning signs of fraud.”