Noida Police’s cybercrime cell arrested 45 people employed in a bogus call centre who were in possession of confidential data from Flipkart and Myntra. They not only had consumer details like their names, email IDs, shipping addresses and order numbers but they also had access to the past orders, which clearly shows the data security issues prevailing in the Indian Ecommerce industry.
These fraudsters were operating the call center from two separate places in Noida and their employees were mostly women. They use to call innocent customers and introduced themselves as representatives of Flipkart and Myntra and were cheating them in the name of providing discounts, cashbacks and rewards on their next purchase. However after a customer placed an order, they would ask for additional registration amount, insurance charges or courier charges and would collect payment through UPI accounts. These UPI accounts were masked accounts without any traces of actual user details, which made it difficult to track them later. Once customers made the payments, the cashback or discount was never provided and customers numbers were blocked so that they can not call again.
According to Police, the fraudsters were active since last one and a half years and had duped thousands of customers. Further it is to be noted that hundreds of such fraudsters are still active across India who are cheating consumers everyday. We, here at Voxya online consumer complaint forum, suggest you to be careful while receiving any phone calls regarding your online purchase. Do not make any payment to any person in their personal account and make it a point to ask them to verify their identity via their official email address of the website.
It has also come to our notice that these fraudsters are creating fake websites and publishing fake customer support numbers of Flipkart, Myntra and all the other famous ecommerce stores like Amazon, ClubFactory, Shein etc in the website. And when a customer calls these fake numbers believing that they are talking to a company executive, these fraudsters trap them in their dirty net. Voxya has been helping consumers not only in avoiding these in fraudsters but also in fighting against them. We have published a long list of fake ecommerce scam phone numbers and websites who are targeting innocent customers to dupe them. If you are in doubt, then you should check for scam website or phone number before proceeding to buy from any of these websites.
Keep shopping but be safe!