As cyber crime cases rise,officials blame the lack of co-ordination between cellphone operators and banks. The cyber crime cell is probing three cases in which SIM cards of bank account holders were blocked by fraudsters before siphoning off money that took place in the second week of this month and in which three persons lost a total of Rs 42 lakh. Sanjay Dhande (65),former director of IIT Kanpur,lost Rs 19 lakh,which was siphoned off in 22 separate online transaction between September 6 and 8. In the second case,businessman Rajesh Kamdar (42) of Nana Peth lost Rs 19 lakh from his bank account on September 12. In the third incident,which came to light on September 15,an engineering professor lost Rs 4.16 lakh from his account. In all these cases,the victims SIM cards had become non-functional a step taken by the fraudsters to ensure that they dont get alerts on their cellphones. An officer said,The SIM card has one or more bank account attached to it. The fraudsters have the other data of the account holder required for accessing the account. In such cases,the banks should employ multilevel authentication. For example,along with the cell number,the handset of the user should also be verified,which can be done by the verification of IMEI number. The banks should not process the request of the user if the cell number and the handset number do not match. But for this system,there has to be co-ordination between the cellphone companies and banks. Also,there are no guidelines from the Reserve Bank of India and Department of Telecommunication about these security issues. DCP (Cyber Crime and EOW) Sanjay Shinde said,Coordination between cellphone operators and banks will definitely be of help in case a multilevel authentication system is to be employed. Hrushikesh Nandedkar,a city-based information security expert,said,It has been observed that after the SIM is blocked,the money is siphoned off from the account via multiple transactions that take place one after the other over a short time period. The banks have systems to detect that the transactions are taking place at this pace one after the other. In such a scenario,an alternative verification mechanism,such as the one using a secondary cellphone,can be employed.
