In the wake of a rise in the number of Aadhaar-related frauds in the city, Kolkata police on Sunday issued an advisory to make people aware of how to prevent such cyber crimes.
A Garfa resident recently lost more than Rs 60,000 without receiving any alert on the generation of OTP or from the bank about the amount having been debited from the account.
Tapas Manna, the Garfa resident, had recently ported his mobile number from one service provider to another and had to give his thumb impression to complete the formalities.
He suspects that misuse of his Aadhaar data, including biometric details, facilitated the fraudulent withdrawal.
“I had recently shared my Aadhaar card details and given my thumb impression at a store to port my cellphone number from one service provider to another. My thumb impression could have been misused,” Manna said.
Manna reported the matter to Garfa police station on Saturday. The police said an investigation had been started.
Senior officers at Lalbazar said the first step to prevent such Aadhaar frauds was to download the mobile app M-Aadhaar and click the “Biometric Lock” option.
“The M-Aadhaar app has to be downloaded from Playstore (for Android phones) or App Store (for iPhones). The ‘Biometric Lock’ option on the app has to be activated,” the officer said. “This is the primary way to prevent any Aadhaar-related fraud by access control.”
In most of the cases that have been reported to the police, fraudsters are making unauthorised use of people’s biometrics to make Aadhaar-enabled payments without their knowledge.
The Lalbazar advisory also mentions that whenever any Aadhaar-linked fraudulent withdrawal is spotted, the victim should go to the nearest ATM and generate a mini-statement.
“This will identify the geographical location of the ATM card-holder and prove that he or she has not made the ‘fraudulent transaction’, which has been made from somewhere else,” said the officer.
The advisory also alerts Kolkatans against sharing photocopies of their Aadhaar cards at random without partially masking their Aadhaar numbers. “A user should mask the Aadhaar number in such a way that only the last four digits are visible. That will would prevent fraudsters from misusing the Aadhaar card details,” the officer said.
“It is also important to keep in mind that we should not provide our biometrics multiple times at the same place even if we are asked to because of some technical glitch.”
Fraudsters obtain and misuse leaked biometric details, including fingerprints, which are cloned and used to make online transactions without the two-step verification.