In a major step to avert conmen editing the phone numbers on Google listings and conning hundreds of people of their hard earned money, Google has initiated action against the fraudulent numbers listed on several websites, after the Maharashtra cyber police wrote to them.
Maharashtra cyber cell and Mumbai police were flooded with complaints of people having fallen prey to the con and becoming victims of cheating due to replacing of numbers on wine shops listing on the internet search engines.
In a recent media interaction, Google India Director (Trust and Safety) Saikat Mitra had said, after the police repeatedly notified them about the misuse of contact number editing option, they had stopped the feature and have identified the numbers that were wrongly edited for cheating purposes. Moreover, these identified numbers were reported to the local police and telephone operators, urging them to block it right away.
The most hit institutions by this listing scam were banks, wine shops and event planners. “Considering the urgency of having calls made to frauds, instead of banks, the community editing option for bank’s contact details on the search engine was disabled last month. However, as this option was blocked, fraudsters moved to wine shops and event planners listings,” Mitra had said. Google has now removed the pictures on some listings, while certain wine shops have written warnings such as “Don’t call on the numbers posted on images” along with the listings.
A senior state cyber cell official told The Free Press Journal, “As soon as an incident is reported to us along with the number, the first thing we do is to contact the mobile operator to fetch details of the user and intimate the search engine to remove that number from their database, making it null and void. But as this modus operandi became known, we learnt during the probe that the accused owns at least 10-15 phones and had replaced the original numbers with one of their own.”
In the last six months, more than 60 cases with similar modus operandi were reported, mostly from Khar, Bandra and Andheri among other western suburbs, wherein victims were duped of lakhs of rupees. In a bid to avert such cases, Mumbai police had written to Google, asking it to delete the phone numbers that are falsely listed as those of wine stores.
Recently, a 32-year-old Jogeshwari resident was duped of Rs 1.53 lakh after he had ordered beer from an Andheri-based wine shop and was shocked to learn that a huge amount was wired from his account to a shell account.
After a technical probe, Amboli Police had arrested a 20-year-old collegian from Bharatpur, who committed similar offences in his free time.
Soon after similar incident came to the fore, Google issued a statement, that read, “We use automated and manual systems to detect for spam and fraud, but we tend not to share details behind our processes so as not to tip off spammers or others with bad intent. We take allegations of fraud very seriously. When an issue like this one is reported to us, we investigate the claims. Upon completion of the investigation, we take actions in line with our findings.”
