Aadhaar card related frauds are on the rise, through which many innocent citizens have been scammed by scamsters. On such incident came to light in Mumbai, whose Aadhaar card copy was doing rounds on the web.
According to Mumbai Mirror, a 34-year-old computer engineer from Girgaon, Ameya Dhapre. He had enrolled for Aadhaar in 2012. But in 2015, Mundhva police station in Pune arrived at his house, suspecting that he had been harassing a woman over the phone. But, when Ameya went to Pune to record his statement, that is when he found out that the man behind the harassment had used Ameya’s Aadhaar card to get KYC done.
Ameya did not file any complaint back then as he believed the issue had been resolved. But later in 2017, when Ameya went to a bank to open an joint account, he was told that his Aadhaar card could not be accepted as it had already been linked with another bank account. After which wrote to bank about the misuse of his Aadhaar card. He later decided to Google his name and that is when he found out that a copy of his Aadhaar card was posted on several websites.
Ameya then contacted Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and lodged a complaint. UIDAI told Ameya that his Aadhaar number could not be changed and adviced to cancel his card. But Ameya was reluctant to cancel his number as it was linked to his various accounts.
Ameya then approached Mumbai police's cyber crime division and filed a complaint. Ameya told the Mumbai Mirror, “My life has become hell. I receive at least two or three authentication-failure emails a day, apart from several anonymous calls and messages, which indicate that people are trying to use my Aadhaar somewhere. Jharkhand, Punjab, Haryana… the list is endless. I also have a toddler at home, and random men turning up at my home every day, sometimes in my absence, is scary.”
