Mumbai woman loses Rs 64,000 after tweets to IRCTC, know what happened

A woman lost around Rs 64,000 to cyber fraudsters after she shared details of her upcoming train tickets on micro-blogging site Twitter in Mumbai.

According to the reports, a resident of the Vile Parle Mumbai, MN Meena, had allegedly booked three tickets on the IRCTC site to travel to Bhuj on January 14. As it is holiday season, the seats were almost full, so she got RAC (Reservation Against Cancellation) seats, which means if a confirmed passenger does not board the train, a full berth will be allotted to the passenger with an RAC ticket. If not, the RAC passenger will have to share a seat.

In order to check if the RAC tickets would be confirmed or not, she shared the train ticket details and mobile number on Twitter and asked IRCTC for information. After some time, Meena got a call from a caller who introduced himself as a customer support executive from IRCTC. He said that he will help them confirm their RAC ticket but they have to follow his instructions.

Meena’s son, who received the call, received a link from the alleged customer support executive and filled up the details including bank account information and others. Then he paid Rs 2 to get their train ticket to Bhuj confirmed on the journey date as per instructipons.

They thought they received a call from the IRCTC’s customer care and assured us of getting our ticket confirmed. However, they did not know that they have fallen prey to cyber fraud.

After giving out the confidential information, they received back-to-back transaction alerts from their bank accounts within minutes. In this she was reportedly duped for Rs 64,000 while she was complaining about her RAC ticket on IRCTC’s Twitter handle.

Meena said, “We had tweeted the complaint, thinking that if our RAC seats do not get confirmed, we would have to travel sitting which will be difficult.”

The fraudster asked them to pay RS 2 through UPI and even asked them to fill in details through a link, police said. Apparently, fraudsters stole the details of Meena’s bank account and UPI security code through the phishing link.

The fraudsters Meena’s number and ticket details via the tweet she posted on Twitter. Later, they used those data to gain her trust and stole details of Meena’s bank account.

so, you should not ever share confidential details online and beware of phishing links. IRCTC or other prominent organisations never ask for money online.