Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Amid gazillions of cyber frauds taking place across the state, another threat has come to limelight. According to state cyber cell officials, crooks opt for fake website domains such as .com, .org, .in etc in the name of reputed brands, after which they appear on Google searches. People making transactions through actual website often fall for these domains and end up losing money to fraudsters.
The data provided by state cyber cell revealed that from January to November 2023, people lost Rs 2.73 crore to fake websites. This is despite the fact that state cyber cell removed 3,000 such fake websites but a majority of them resurfaced on Google searches.
Now, efforts are underway to build a firewall security system, which does not let these fake websites pop up in Google searches and safeguard people’s money.
Officials said platforms like Go Daddy, Big Rock, Net For India and One and One provide website domains to people. Easy access to website domains helps crooks in playing clever on people under the garb of big brands such as Google Pay, Phone pay, Flipkart and Amazon.
After people land on websites with fake domains, they are made to download mirroring applications with which the crooks get a hang of people’s banking details and siphon off money from their bank accounts easily. Apart from this, the use of third party applications among users is also contributing to growing graph of cyber frauds across the state.
Exercise caution: SP
State cyber cell Superintendent of Police Vaibhav Shrivastava said one should never provide his or her mobile phone number given to banks to avail discount coupons, scratch cards or lotteries. They should give alternative number. He added that the central government would soon be apprised of fake domain websites, after which firewall security system would be introduced.
