Credit Card in the name of RBI : RBI cautions Once More about the Newest Kind of Fraud perpetrated in its Name

The Reserve Bank of India today issued one more alert to the pub­lic about the newest form of fraud per­pe­trat­ed in its name — a cred­it card issued by fraud­sters in the name of the Reserve Bank. Explain­ing the modus operan­di, the Reserve Bank stat­ed that the gullible mem­ber of the pub­lic is sent a cred­it card which allows with­draw­al of mon­ey up to a cer­tain lim­it, albeit a small sum, from a bank account. Hav­ing gained the con­fi­dence of the vic­tim thus, the fraud­ster gets him to deposit a huge sum of mon­ey in the same bank account. Once the mon­ey is deposit­ed, the card stops work­ing and that would also be the last time the hold­er of the card (vic­tim) would hear from the fraudster.

Warn­ing against such efforts, the Reserve Bank has reit­er­at­ed that as India’s cen­tral bank, it does not car­ry out any busi­ness with an indi­vid­ual, whether through sav­ings bank account, cur­rent bank account, cred­it card, deb­it card, online bank­ing ser­vices or receiv­ing and hold­ing funds in for­eign exchange or any oth­er form of bank­ing ser­vices.  The Reserve Bank has list­ed out the oth­er kind of preva­lent frauds, such as:

1. Fic­ti­tious offers of large sum of money/lottery win­nings by email or through phone calls by pos­ing as RBI official.
2. Fake Reserve Bank web­site for online transactions

• Lur­ing mem­bers of pub­lic to secure their bank accounts against such frauds by ask­ing them to share the bank account details, includ­ing user id/password, through an email or by click­ing on a link giv­en in email.

1. Offer of employ­ment in the Reserve Bank through email

The Reserve Bank has also stat­ed that fic­ti­tious offers are also made in the name of oth­er pub­lic insti­tu­tions, such as, Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF), Income Tax author­i­ties, Cus­toms author­i­ties or pub­lic fig­ures like Gov­er­nor, Dr. Raghu­ram Rajan or oth­er senior RBI officials.

The Reserve Bank has point­ed out that once the mon­eys are paid in fraud­sters’ accounts, there are remote chances of the mem­bers of pub­lic recov­er­ing the moneys.

The Reserve Bank has once again cau­tioned mem­bers of pub­lic that falling prey to such offers can result in com­pro­mis­ing one’s own cru­cial per­son­al infor­ma­tion that may be mis­used to cause direct finan­cial and oth­er loss to them. They, in their own inter­est, should refrain from respond­ing to such offers in any man­ner. Rather, they should imme­di­ate­ly lodge a com­plaint with Cyber Crime branch of the Police, the con­tact details of which are avail­able in the Reserve Bank’s press release issued ear­li­er (Com­plain to Local Police/Cyber Crime Author­i­ties against Fic­ti­tious Offers of Mon­ey from Abroad).