Dadar resident loses nearly 73,000 in 5 min to card fraud

MUMBAI: A Dadar resident became the latest victim of debit card fraud when her card details and 3-D authentication was used to pay for online purchases of Rs 72,987 on January 8. The fraudsters made five transactions on three websites in five minutes.
The bank account was held jointly by Nupur Jhajharia and her father Krishna (66), a real estate consultant, police said. Krishna said he learnt of the fraud when he woke up at around 7.30am and found five alerts in his email and message list, for the fraudulent transactions.“The online payments—the first transaction for Rs 39,989, followed by Rs 9,999, Rs 9,999, Rs 10,000 and Rs 3,000—were carried out between 5.15am to 5.20am. I called ICICI Bank customer care around 7.30am and alerted them about the fraud using our debit card. The bank asked me to lodge a police complaint,” Krishna told TOI.
Krishna said when he approached the Dadar police along with his daughter, they were asked to first get a complaint number from the bank. “When we approached the bank’s Prabhadevi branch at 11am, they too refused to take the complaint without a complaint number from customer care. It was not provided to me in the first instance by the bank. I again called up the customer care and was told that the complaint number will be sent to me by SMS within the next 30 minutes. After several attempts to contact the bank’s customer care, finally at 2.30pm I managed to get the complaint number and a copy of the transaction details,” he claimed.
Dadar police senior inspector Nishikant Patil confirmed that a complaint application was received from Jhajharia. They are probing the matter before converting the complaint into an FIR.
“In all transactions effected from the said debit card, a PIN privy only to the customer has been used. This is a two-factor authentication specifically built for first-time online transactions in addition to the ATM PIN. The customer may have inadvertently shared details of the debit card, including the confidential PIN, with someone. We reiterate that ICICI Bank acts, at all times, in good faith, with diligence and without any intent prejudicial to the interests of its customers,” said an ICICI Bank spokesperson.