A 30-year-old professor became a victim of phishing mail scam and lost Rs 1 lakh ($1,533) while filing income tax (I-T) returns online. The professor, whose identity has not been revealed, hails from Hyderabad city in India's southern state Telangana.
The Rachakonda cyber crime police said that the professor received a mail that claimed to give a link to file income tax returns. When the man clicked on the link it redirected him to a fake website that had an identical I-T homepage.
The cyber crime police said that his colleagues also received similar emails, but it is not clear whether they clicked on the website or not.
"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," The Times of India quoted S Harinath, assistant commissioner of police (Cyber Crime), Rachakond, as saying.
Harinath said that people should pay attention to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) before making any payment on any website.
"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 Though the letter 'o' has been replaced by zero, people fail to check such small details," he said.
The cyber crime department has until now registered over 50 cases of fake websites.
