Hyderabad: The Hyderabad city police alerted citizens on Thursday, to stay cautious against SIM (Subscriber Identity Modules) swapping and evolved cyberfraud techniques stirring a storm in public.
The warning comes after a man in Delhi was duped out of over 50 lakhs just by receiving missed calls.
There have been several accounts in recent months about people who have lost money—sometimes even millions of dollars—as a result of unlawful SIM shifting.
Cybercriminals are increasingly using SIM swapping as an efficient and sophisticated method to bypass two-step verifications without even having to request an OTP from the true owner.
On their Twitter account, the city police asked residents to get in touch with their service provider immediately if they believe their SIM card has been switched.
SIM swapping
A copy of your SIM card is often obtained by a cybercriminal in SIM switching. However, in order to accomplish this, they require access to your personal information, which they may get using standard phishing tactics. This information includes your ID, phone number, complete name, email address, birthdate, etc.
Then, they only need to get in touch with the mobile provider to impersonate you on the phone, online, or even in person.
Once they have a replica SIM, they may also obtain OTPs and do bank account verifications and other tasks for the subscriber. Many of them have successfully stolen money from accounts in the past using this precise method.
In the past six months, a business in India has seen an average of 1783 assaults per week, compared to 1645 attacks per organisation in the APAC region, according to Check Point Threat Intelligence Report.
The goal here is to collect personal information that online criminals can utilise later. Additionally, according to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), both the overall number of ransomware assaults and phishing instances in the country climbed from 280 in 2020 to 523 in 2021.
How to find out if your SIM has been swapped?
Look out for loss of signal:
You will lose all mobile signal, which is evidence that there is a duplicate SIM card. This is due to the fact that your phone will now have a SIM card but no access to a mobile network.
You won’t be able to send or receive SMS or calls as a result. If this occurs, you must immediately get in touch with the police and your cell provider so that they may disable the SIM that the hackers are using and begin the process of retrieving your data.
If you do see that this occurs, try to get in touch with your bank to prevent any transactions right away and inform them of potential SIM fraud.
Be careful with personal data:
Cybercriminals will need this information to replicate your SIM. This is why it’s so crucial to be cautious while choosing which websites you visit. Verify the website’s legitimacy and the presence of all necessary security measures, such as an encrypted connection.
Watch for the padlock icon in the address bar, which indicates the presence of a valid security certificate and that the URL starts with HTTPS://. If the URL omits the final -S:/, the website may be unsafe. Never submit personal information on any website that requests it, particularly on websites whose links you could get through a WhatsApp message.
Follow on Twitter | Posted by Masrath Fatima | 
