With an increase in the number of ATM frauds in the country, the assessment year 2018-19 recorded 980 cases of ATM frauds around the country, the highest number till today. Inspite of the government taking precautionary actions in such cases, this number has increased significantly since the past 2 years.
Maharashtra Tops Delhi with Highest Fraud Cases
Maharashtra beats the capital city and holds the highest number of ATM frauds in the country, with a solid number of 233 cases in 2018-19. Delhi and Tamil Nadu mark 179 and 147 fraud cases, respectively. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura were the only states with zero fraud cases.
In Maharashtra, people lost Rs 4.8 crore to bank fraud, while in Delhi people lost Rs 2.9 crore. Tamil Nadu acing too, lost more money than Delhi, Rs 3.36 crore.
This year, the number of fraud cases has increased largely, as compared to 2017-2018, which recorded 911 fraud cases. However, despite more number of fraud cases recorded, the amount of money lost in such frauds have come down. It has been recorded to be Rs 21.4 crore in 2018-19, while the AY 2017-18, even though recorded lesser number of fraud cases, lost Rs 65.3 crore to such frauds.
It has been reported that this number, 980 has been finalized at the count when only amounts greater than Rs 1 lakh was considered. It’s just like scratching the surface.
How to They Dupe Your Money?
Police and cyber-crime departments every state has more than once warned and performed several workshops where they’ve educated people of how crooks dupe common men off their entire accounts. They use various tricks and techniques to get control over others’ credit and debit cards.
The most common method is by installing a skimmer device on ATM machines or any point-of-sale machine, which copies the data illegally whenever a card is swiped in that machine. This data is then embedded on blank cards and illegal transactions are performed.
Many a time, such people pose as bank customer-care agents and fool people into providing them with their CVV number and ATM pins, by luring them into some new bank scheme or card offers, later on looting them off their complete bank balance.
Government’s Role in Prevention of Such ATM Frauds
The government no doubt has been grinding itself tirelessly, in efforts to bring down counts of such online and ATM frauds. Nonetheless, this number has been increasing since the past two years, even though the amount looted has come down this year, as compared to the year before.
Last year, RBI had mandated banks to ask their customers to switch to their existing debit/credit cards with new ones. These new cards were EMV chip-cards, replacing the magnetic stripe-only cards. Such cards have higher data encryption and storage technology when compared to magnetic stripe cards.
This makes it difficult to copy sensitive customer information by frauds. This shift was advised worldwide, to cut down the number of card cloning. Cloning from magnetic stripe cards is easier as it static information, which can easily be derived out if a cloning machine is used in the ATM.
In fact, RBI had mandated banks to come up with upgraded ATMs and implement security measures, along with upgrading all of their ATMs with supported version of the operating system in a phased manner by June 2019. There has been no news on any such undertaking of activities yet.
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