The companies taking action include travel majors MakeMyTrip Group and Oyo Hotels & Homes, mobile payments firm Paytm, online food delivery aggregators Swiggy & Zomato, besides ride-hailing giant Uber.
Three people aware of the matter said these companies met the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last week to make a joint representation on the issue and how to curb these online frauds — engineered via fake toll-free numbers and serial bank account generators, among other methods. About 4,000 SIM card numbers and 350-400 bank account numbers have been shared with the RBI, State Bank of India (SBI) and the telecom companies, whose services are used to fool the unsuspecting consumers.
These tech companies have also reached out to Google about how its search engine is used by cybercriminals to make their fake toll-free numbers appear on top of search results. This leads to some of the consumers believing the fake number to be the legitimate number of the company. Some even go on to set up fake websites mimicking the original ones.
Over the past couple of weeks, executives from these internet companies met senior officials of SBI, Airtel and other stakeholders, sources added. Among the companies that are part of this council, MakeMyTrip, Swiggy, Zomato and Paytm have confirmed the development to TOI. Going forward, more online firms are expected to join the group to share their fraud data to counter su ..
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