Cross border threat on calls

Bharti Airtel reveals that many of their customers are receiving fraudulent calls mostly missed calls. It is expected that these calls are coming from across the border. A company spokesman has revealed that, callers often call back thinking 92 is a Tata Indicom number, overlooking the fact that +92 is Pakistan’s country code.  On returning the missed call, the person at the other end would pretend to be an Airtel staffer and inform the caller that he/she has won a lottery/award conducted by the company. The fraudster would then attempt to dupe the customer into sharing sensitive personal information about his/her voter ID, PAN, bank account and credit card data and demand a commission (usually DTH recharge vouchers) to receive the winnings. He also said that an advisory which is up on our website to protect all mobile/landline users from falling victim to these malicious activities. It is believed that it is best to avoid responding to suspicious missed calls from unknown numbers. The reason behind going deep into this fact is that some Airtel cellphone subscribers making calls to Pakistan have been getting an SMS soon after informing them that they have just made a call to a number beginning with 0092 and advising them to exercise caution while calling unknown numbers and refrain from sharing personal details. These SMSs might appear to be automated messages sent by the service provider on a new security diktat from Indian intelligence agencies whereas reality is that, there is no diktat of the kind.