Fake SMS Scams On Rise

Fake SMS scams are on the rise over the last few months. Fraudsters are mass spamming mobile users with fake messages claiming that they have won some lottery or lucky draw from the UK. Below are some of the scam messages:

BT.UK: YOUR GSM NO. HAS WON 500,000GBP IN BTELECOM INT’L MOBILE DRAW TO CLAIM, SEND MOBILE NO,NAME AND ADDRESS TO EMAIL:btclaim@hotmail.co.uk TEL:+447014234932.

YOU HAVE AWARDED 500,000 BRITISH POUNDS IN OUR COCA-COLA MOBILE DRAW TO CLAIM SEND NAME, MOBILE NO, SEX, AGE, UR EMAIL, RESIDENT ADDRESS TO THE VIA EMAIL: coca-colamobiledraw1@hotmail.com, +447017034188

A user is asked to send his personal details to the specified email addresses. Upon receipt of an email with information like contact number, address from the user, they call the user from a mobile number seemingly originating from the UK to inform them that the very next day their diplomat will come to New Delhi Airport with a demand draft of the mentioned amount. On the next day they ask the user to pay an amount (INR 8000 to INR 25000) required for legal processing or custom clearance charges and settlement charges at airport. They provide bank account details from nationalized banks which are traced to North Eastern states of India. These nationalized banks are slow to respond to such complaints which take months to freeze the accounts used by fraudsters.

Mobile numbers used for fake calling are traced back to Delhi. Lack of co-operation amongst Cyber Crime investigating agencies across India, lethargy of mobile operators in implementing security measures to stop such SMS messages and slow operations of nationalized banks are giving the upper hand to fraudsters in running their operations smoothly.

Users are advised not to reply to such SMS messages and emails and not to fall into these Social Engineering traps.