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Police Arrest Five People in a Suspected International Online Banking Scam

The Capital has seen the first instance of identity fraud carried out through "phishing" e-mails. The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Delhi police has apprehended five persons, of which four are Nigerian nationals and one Indian, on accusations of earning lakhs of rupees transacted from many UTI Bank accounts using a Web page similar to bank's official page.

Speaking to reporters, K.K.Vyas, Additional Deputy Commissioner, Delhi Police, said that five people, including a woman, had been taken into custody.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (EOW) Prabhakar said on Friday that UTI Bank recently filed a complaint that some unidentified people had taken out lakhs of rupees from the customer accounts in Delhi, Visakhapatnam, Thane, Nasik and Ahmedabad. These customers had received e-mails supposedly on behalf of the bank asking them to provide their personal details.

Inquiries have shown that the cheated customers got e-mails seeming to come from UTI Bank and instructing them to access their account through a hyperlink contained in the mail. The duped account holders duly clicked on the hyperlink and found a web-page not different from that of the UTI Bank official website. They keyed in their bank accounts on this page, thus revealing fundamental details to the criminals. "Phishing" actually refers to this very style of operation for illegal capture of identities.

Several people were taken in by the hoax and gave away their particulars. Employing this information, the culprits siphoned out around 25 lakh rupees from a number of accounts of the fooled customers. Police authorities believe the fraud was international in nature.

Mr. Prabhakar suspects Lagos in Nigeria to be the origin of the phishing mails. The illegal transactions done by using the passwords of the bank customers appear to have been effected by accessing the victims' accounts from Nigeria, Atlanta and California. Mr. Prabhakar said that more arrests in the case might come up. He recommended Internet-banking users to ignore any e-mail requesting them to visit a website and provide personal details. The bank should first be asked whether it has sent out such an e-mail or not.

Related article: Police Arrests Six Suspects Associated With TJX Credit Scam

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