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What began as a simple phone call, the outline of the FedEx scam has changed several times and become increasingly difficult to crack in recent times.
Recent data released on Wednesday shows residents lost Rs 65.19 crore to the scam alone in the first five months of this year, with 521 cases till May. This is a whopping 71% jump in just five months as compared to the whole of 2023 when people lost about Rs 30.81 crore. Of the 521 cases, the highest were recorded in the Whitefield division where people lost over Rs 14.73 crore, compared to Rs 6.47 crore last year.
It starts with mislead calls, where the fraudsters would introduce themselves as Fedex representatives, a cyber police official
told TNIE. Later, they added video calls featuring fake police officers to make it more credible. The “policeman” into whose call the victim is transferred during the call, is also part of the fraud. The scam has undergone visible change with the increasing technologies and other sophistications, a senior government official added.
It now includes frequent use of mule accounts for receiving and redirecting money, spoofed numbers with fake caller IDs to make them look genuine, voice modulation to disguise the caller’s voice and use of payment gateways located on servers outside the country which process these fraudulent transactions.
Officials indicated that this year, the trend has increased to the extent that cyber fraudsters compelled a lawyer to undress himself before a camera and digitally filmed him for a period of 36 hours, depriving him of Rs 1.5 million.
In another development, they tricked a 70-year-old journalist and digitally arrested him for a period of eight days.
Protecting the masterminds Crimes are getting more complex, the official said explaining that earlier police were often able to unwind some shifts and recover funds if the crime was reported promptly. But now each crime involves more than 100 mule accounts used to divert funds.
“The fraudsters ensure that no account holds over Rs 10,000 by blocking all accounts once funds are received and then rerouting the money through other bank accounts,” the official said.
He pressed that the telecom companies should not allow customers to make online payment during calls.
Therefore, such precautions may become necessary because, most of the time, fraudsters engage or blindfold victims in calls that are innocently connected with an OTP and basic personal information.
