Beware iPhone users: cybercriminals are targeting with sophisticated scams
Hyderabad: Beware iPhone users, a new type of scam is employed by the scammers to share account details and siphoning the hard earned money. This sophisticated ploy involves phishing messages to steal payment credentials and siphon off substantial amounts of money from unsuspecting victims. Most of the victims are failing to even realize the scam before it was too late.
An IT employee, Radha(name changed) in the month of June received a message to her iphone which read as claimed to be from an Indian post : “Your package has arrived at the warehouse and we attempted delivery twice but were unable to due to incomplete address information. Please update your address details within 48 hours, otherwise your package will be returned. Please update the address in the link: https:// indiaposttj.vip/IN After the update is completed we will re-deliver within 24 hours, India Post!”
Since the victim was expecting a few packages from different sources falling prey to it she thought it was a genuine text and opened the link and added her address. After adding the address she was redirected to a payment page where they had asked her to pay a fee of Rs 25.
A month later when the unaware victim tried to do a bill payment using a credit card and it got declined twice. When checking her text messages, she noticed that there were few transactions which happened without her notice. Alarmingly, these were international transactions, with the cyber fraudster siphoning Thai baht (THB), the official currency of Thailand, in three separate transactions: THB 100,000, THB 10,000, and THB 60,000. The total amounted to approximately Rs 4 lakhs in Indian currency.
After realizing that her accounts were compromised, the victim blocked all the accounts, reported the scam in National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal and approached the Hyderabad Cyber crime police for help. When the police official enquired about sharing account details anywhere the victim realized that about the alleged phishing message from Indian post. Subsequently the police registered a case and started an investigation.
Flagging the same V C Sajjanar, Senior IPS officer took to X (formerly twitter) and said, “Cyber fraudsters targeting iPhone users by creating fake websites from the India Post. They are sending false messages through iMessage to grab information.Beware! Don’t click on random links(sic)”.
