STATE TIMES NEWS
JAMMU: Already grappling with electricity woes, especially on the face of unscheduled power curtailment and installation of smart meters, the consumers of the winter capital find themselves in yet another quagmire-this time around from cyber fraudsters, who have suddenly become active with nobody taking cognizance.
The cyber criminals are flashing SMS alerts to mobile subscribers, asking them to deposit the tariff billed, lest the supply will be disconnected. Such alerts have different messages but the underlying contention is to trap some of the innocent consumers who may get influenced to fall in line.
One of the recipient of such an alert shared the SMS message with STATE TIMES, reading ‘Dear Consumer your Electricity Power Will be disconnected Tonight at 9.30Pm Last Month Bill was not updated Contact Our 9353688947’ (the typos as relieved by the recipient).
When the recipient dialed the number provided in the SMS alert, the call was taken and his conversation was apparently heard, as he asked, ‘Which bill is yet to be paid’, ‘All the bills have already been deposited and there is nothing to update’. On listening to this, the line was snapped. When attempted again several times, either there was no response or the phone came switched off.
This is not an isolated incident as the mobile subscribers do keep getting such messages quite often. While most of them ignore these SMS alerts for their being ‘scams’ or ‘spasm’ , many innocent recipients are likely to fall in the trap. Since the senders give contact numbers also, it should not be a big deal for the Cyber Wing of Jammu and Kashmir Police to crack the fraudsters, assuming though that these numbers too might be fake and fraud, like the originators of the messages. The Cyber Wing is capable enough to find out the fraudsters and fix them as per law.
