Scamsters? Available on Social Media Now!

Something terrible could’ve happened if my mother had fallen to the trap of scam-callers that day. We could’ve lost all our savings.

My mother had received an almost “officially drafted” message from an unknown number over WhatsApp regarding the non-payment of the electricity bill. Though sure that my father had paid the bill on time, she was vulnerable to the idea that the transaction might’ve failed, and to avoid a power-cut, she started engaging in a conversation of ‘what-to-do-next’ with the stranger on the other side of the chat. The mystery man called, convinced my mother to download the screen-sharing app on her phone (obviously under the pretense that this app would generate an OTP to track the transaction), and almost got access to all the data on her phone.

My mother, who knew the importance of OTPs, knew it wasn’t wise to just share the OTP. Being a simple homemaker, she is not very tech-savvy, so she called us and explained the entire scenario, and we got her to uninstall the screen sharing application and secure all other applications on her phone. She was scared. That is when she realized that she was a victim to the scam-callers that she’d seen documentaries and series about.

We convinced her it’s all good now and got her to block those numbers. Post that, we used Truecaller to find out that the number belonged to a person in Assam, who was trying to target a potential victim in Gujarat.

While discussing this with my cousins, we realised that at least my mother had the presence of mind to not share the OTP. What about the other innocent people who are not educated enough to dodge such calls? Thousands of people are being targeted and they are being robbed in the matter of minutes.

What’s worse is that these scam-callers are not restricting themselves to normal calls. WhatsApp, Instagram and other social media platforms are now becoming the hot-zone for such callers. And there’s no putting a stop to it.

I hope that more and more people start getting aware of such scamsters and not fall prey to their scheme. Apart from reporting them to the particular authorities, if anyone has a suggestion as to how we can prevent this uprising situation, feel free to leave a comment.

Stay safe, everyone!