How to safeguard yourself from OTP scams?

OTP based financial scams are on the rise and there are some important steps you can take to safeguard yourself from these OTP scams

We would try to understand the making of a OTP scam with a case study of events which are happening in India

If you are using mobile payments or have your mobile linked to your bank account then you vulnerable to be a victim of an OTP scam.

How OTP scams work

OTP scams come in various flavours however the common link in all OTP scam involves a scammer and a victim.
The scammer tricks a victim to share an OTP (One Time Password)

This is a password sent out by the victim's bank to complete an online bank transfer of funds.

These can happens in multiple ways such as
A scammer gets access to a users bank details like bank name, account number and branch details.
They would call up the victim posing as an employee of the bank. Posing as a bank employee he gains the trust of the victim. Once he feels he has gained trust he would ask the user for an OTP on a pretext.
This pretext would be doing online KYC, sending out a cheque book, issuing a credit or debit card etc.
Once the victim agrees to sharing the details the victim would initiate a login into a mobile banking app or a payment app is linked and do a financial transaction that transfers the funds from a victims account to the scammers account.

Another kind of scam is that a courier comes to the victim and says you have an online delivery. If the victim says he has not ordered anything then the courier would say he would initiate a return process. For this his company would send an OTP to the victim.
At this point his partner who is sitting remotely would initiate a bank transfer and the victim receives an OTP.
Most victims assume that this OTP (One time password) is from the courier company for initiating a parcel return and share the otp.
As the OTP has a limited validity of a few minutes the scammer posing as the courier quickly shares the OTP with his partner who initiates the bank transfer that often sweeps the bank account clean.

There are multiple other scenarios in which a scammer can lure the victim.

Time to break the chain

The first point to note here is read the sms message to see who is the sender. If it is a courier company or a bank.
If one is careful then one can decipher if the sms is for initiating a refund or a money transfer.
A big step one can take is keep two separate sims. One linked to your bank and another one for online shopping.
So if you use a mobile number for shopping that is not linked to your online banking then even if the scammer inputs the victim's mobile into the banking system and tries to initiate a bank validation the process would fail as there would be no bank account associated with the mobile number used for shopping.

This simple step and a bit of discipline can stop the scammers in their tracks.

What if you are not from India

Still, this is good to know information.
These days standard tech is used across different demographics. The tools to scam and the blueprints are often available on the darknet and hacking forums so these tricks can be applied by the scammers in practically any country.

Stay safe and keep your funds safe.
This post is written with the intent to make the readers aware of the various financial scams that are happening around us.

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Posted Using InLeo Alpha

Posted Using InLeo Alpha