OYO, Paytm, Swiggy, Zomato, MMT and Uber club together to fight online fraud

India has witnessed a significant upsurge in the number of online shoppers in the last couple of years. Along with this, the number of cyber fraud cases, in the forms of fund transfer, card skimming and data theft, has also increased. Most often, the victims are either bank users or new tech platform or e-comm platforms users. It also brings a bad name to these platforms.

To combat this issue, leading internet tech platforms that include Makemytrip, OYO, Paytm, Swiggy, Zomato and Uber have joined hands to safeguard their consumers from cyber frauds.

They reached to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), SBI, Airtel and other stakeholders and reportedly made a joint presentation on issues and measures required to fight the menace of cybercrime.

These firms also shared close to 4,000 SIM card numbers of telecom firms, whose services are used dupe users and around 400 bank account numbers, said TOI report quoting people privy to the development.

The online firms wrote to SBI, apprising them of large scale fraud being committed through the public sector bank accounts.

Fraudsters use already trusted medium to dupe users such as toll-free number, PSU bank account and Whatsapp usages. Of late, fake reward calls are also made using the names of big tech firms.

That is not all. Cyber frauds also use Google and SEO to make their related search such as toll-free number appear on top of search results.

Tech firms also communicated to the search engine that how cybercriminals have used its platform in duping consumers. Customers consider most of the links or sites appearing on top results as genuine websites and often get duped through phishing means, it added.

They have appealed to Google to take a step to weed out fake sites and numbers from their platform.

Entrackr also reached out the tech firms for more details on the development. We will update the post as an when we receive a response from them.

Meanwhile, cyber fraud cases have shot up in the country. The rising cases of online cheating and cyber frauds have also been giving sleepless nights to Delhi Police. As per last year data, over 70% of the cases registered with the cyber cell are yet to be solved.

There is no doubt that more aggressive steps are required in this direction. Also, more tech firms need to join the fight against the menace of cyber frauds to ensure safety to online shoppers.