The startup ecosystem has come to the fore for being specifically targeted by fraudsters who are successfully duping or trying to dupe people impersonating as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of a particular company and asking for money and other favours.
Different types of cyber crimes like phishing, identity theft, software hack, cyberbullying, spamming, data hack and cryptojacking is not new or surprising to the people. Especially menace related to phone scams which includes cases of voice phishing and fake impersonation to a caller using some other identity and luring them into offers and later con them has been like a piece of cake for scamsters.
Lately, the startup ecosystem has come to the fore for being specifically targeted by fraudsters who are successfully duping or trying to dupe people impersonating as Chief Executive Officer (CEOs) of a particular company and asking for money and other favours.
The scamster, whose text came from an unknown number, with Meesho CEO’s official picture as a display profile, asked Shikar Saxena, who works for the firm, if he can make a payment for a gift meant for a client through Paytm.
The text he received read, “Hello Shikar, Are you Available?” and the person identified himself as “Vidit Aatrey, Founder and CEO @Meesho. Can you confirm if you can make this purchase from Paytm? I will reimburse you,”.
Reacting to the tweet, many founders, co-founders and entrepreneurs said that they too have received similar messages and asking what is this new type of fraud targeting start-ups.
Kunal Bahl, who is an entrepreneur and investor took to Twitter on Saturday after a person was approached via WhatsApp impersonating as Bahl and asked for Amazon gift purchases for donation purpose and promised reimbursement later.
“It’s a flattering yet a pretty dumb con in the scheme of cons, and I don’t think anyone falls for this. In case you were planning to, please don’t” Bahl tweeted.
Speaking to CNBC TV18, Cyber law expert Pavan Duggal said that this is an emerging new form of phishing targetting startup ecosystem and small funded companies.
“Yes, we are seeing cases of such nature where random people are posing as CEO, CFO of companies and asking employees of the same company to make online purchases and after the deal is done, they follow the same pattern of absconding leaving behind no traces. Earlier there used to be lottery related scams but this is much more than that and scamsters doing this are professionals knowing how to play innovatively,” Duggal said.
“If the CEOs of companies are no careful, their employees will fall into such trap eventually resulting in loss of money. One should never trust these calls and messages firstly even if the person claims to be the boss of company. It’s better to immediately report such matters on priority basis,” he added.
What Duggal implied and which is a matter of concern as seen in most cyber related crime cases is that there is no figure as to how many such matters have been reported.
“What is the major cause of concern is that start-up companies and small funded firms don’t report these cases out of fear of losing capital funding or having a bad name of not able to maintain a secure cyber field in their companies. So cases don’t get registered and things keep on going in a cycle,” Duggal said.
The statement is evident from the statistics given by Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to Lok Sabha in December 2022, that people reported 1,500 cyber crime incidents every day on an average of which only around 30 are converted into FIRs.
According to cyber experts, ‘CEO- Scam’ modus operandi, victims are first contacted using fake DPs and changing names and then asked to purchase gift items online, app-store code gifts, vouchers, E-gift cards etc for which they are promised reimbursement which never happens and by the time the whole con game is understood, it’s too later.
Credit: Source link
