How to Stay Safe from Digital Scams: Insights and Preventive Measures for a Secure Future

Understanding the Rapid Surge in Digital Scams and the Importance of Awareness in a Technology-Driven World

The rising digital scams in India, discussed by PM Narendra Modi in Mann Ki Baat, highlight the importance of safeguarding personal data. With over 1.2 billion mobile phone users, India ranks 10th in global cybercrime reports. Government efforts, including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP), aim to combat unauthorized access and fraudulent practices. Measures like Sanchar Sathi and Chakshu block millions of fraud calls daily, but public awareness remains key to prevention.

What makes us fall into the fissures of the digital scam, while we all have in fractions or in largeness the knowledge of the aftermath consequences of it.

The discussion on it by our Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi in his Mann ki Baat series has brought into the focus the sudden surge of Digital Arrest scam.

India’s telecommunication network is second among all the countries. Currently India stands 10th in the cyber crime report. India has about 1.2 billion mobile phone users. 600 million users belong to the category of smartphone users.

Some of the government initiatives to save people from getting victimized are as follows:

Recently the government has intervened in the unauthorized access to Indian citizens’ Personal Identifiable Information(PII). The fintech companies i.e. the companies that play on technology to render financial services access customers’ personal information i.e. full name, addresses, phone numbers and other details by utilizing their PAN numbers connection to consumer credit card scores. Though this might not be a data breach but gets done without taking the respective customer’s consent. Steps are being taken to implement the Digital Private Data Protection Act, 2023(DPDP). Under this act, businesses must obtain proper consent and use authorized channels when processing citizens’ information.

Union Minister of Communications of India Mr. Jyotiraditya Scindia talked about the guard of 2500 cr. assets of people just by the endeavors of the DoT fraud detection network. It has been achieved by channels Sanchar Sathi and Chakshu. The software is blocking 1.35 crore fraud calls on a daily basis along with 1.8 million headers. About 2.9 lakh phones operating with the help of overseas servers have been disconnected.

The hackers have been and still do keep coming up with new and foolproof ways to steal personal information and use them for their advantage.

Technology has certainly left no place untouched in our lives. And so has our obligation to stay connected. Call forwarding for example has become a viable tool for the hackers to attain access to the person’s messages and personal contacts through applications such as Whatsapp, which is increasingly getting popular and used by more and more people.

After the work gets over people either forget to disable the function or simply leave it without any further thought. This allows scammers to intercept calls and steal OTPs sent for account verification.

During our normal browsing the pop-up windows without the padlock icon contain a phishing link which activates malware in the phone and thus the owner’s bank account gets compromised.

During the online payments and shopping the information stays saved in the web-browsers such as Chrome, Firefox etc under the history option. People miss out on deletion either due to lack of time or awareness. These staying in offline mode act as the vulnerable gateways for the scammers to enter our private web-world.

There are several fake websites which open illegal sites in the name of the prestigious e-commerce sites. Opening accounts without proper verification on our part costs us more than we can imagine.

The famous applications such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram popular among youngsters too are used by scammers to lure and then intimidate the young minds towards pornography.

All these get done through a pre-planned manner and it doesn’t take much for people to get preyed upon. To the maximum, things rest in our hands. Our awareness and sharing can only keep us and all around us safe from the scammers impending attacks.