Hyderabad: Income Tax returns for the current year are due to be filed by the end of July month and hackers seem to take advantage of the same rush.
A 30-year-old professor recently got robbed of Rs 1 lakh rupees while filing his I-T returns online.
According to Rachakonda Cyber Crime Police, the victim received a phishing mail link to file IT returns online identical to I-T homepage, TOI reports.
S Harinath, Assistant Commissioner (Cyber Crime), Rachakonda said, “We suspect more such cases in the coming weeks as the I-T returns for this year are due to be filed by July 31. Apart from the victim, his colleagues had received similar emails. We frequently get complaints about people getting duped after they log onto a fake website.”
Adding that as many as 45 FIRs have been recently registered against various cyber crimes, he also said, 500 verbal petitions have been registered since January and nearly 50 cases of fake websites have been brought to the Cyber crime’s notice.
“Most of the cases involve very less amount of money and so the victim does not file an FIR. Only when the amount is in lakhs, people lodge a police complaint,” he added.
Cautioning people to pay attention to the URLs he said, “People need to pay more attention to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) before making any payments on such websites. We know how the real homepage looks like. So, we do not check the URL. There are several fake websites that look exactly the same as the original but the URL will be different. Like ‘www.facebook-.com’ might be ‘faceb00k.com’. Though the letter ‘o’ has been replaced by zero, people fail to check such small details.”