The billionaire CEO recounted a personal incident via a Twitter thread in which his friend (name not given) was initially offered a part-time job via WhatsApp.

The first tasks involved leaving fake reviews for resorts and restaurants in random places like Peru, Kamath said, after which the person received £30,000 as payment for completing the given task.

Later, the scammers added the person to a group created on the Telegram messaging platform to complete some of the tasks. “The next task for the group was to trade according to a set of rules on a mock crypto platform. The profits made were allowed to be withdrawn even without transferring real money,” he said.

In order to show profits, they manipulated the prices of “ransom crypto tokens” and showed them to the victim. “By the way, that wasn’t bitcoin or ethereum, but random crypto tokens whose prices scammers could easily manipulate.

The group has now been asked to transfer real money in order to generate higher returns. Others in the group who said they were switching nudged my friend into it.”

After much duress and what appeared “legitimate” from the outside, the person transferred more money. “I think the risk didn’t seem huge as the money transferred was the £30,000 made through the platform.

But greed prevailed and more money was transferred, probably due to pressure from others in the group who claimed to have made big transfers and profits,” Kamath said.

Later, the person tried to withdraw but couldn’t and was told that a certain number of trades was required. “The fear of not being able to withdraw the money prevailed and more money was added to the trade. This amounted to £5,000, a large sum for each person,” revealed Kamath.

To further scam the person, the fake platform offered a “loan” when the person said there was no more money to add. “The person eventually decided to confide in the spouse about the situation, who almost immediately realized it was a scam. She turned to the police for help.”

He said after the victim filed a police complaint, police shared many cases – “even highly educated people who borrow dozens of lakhs and lose them in such sophisticated scams”.

“Everyone is a target and we need to create awareness. The most important thing to remember is that there’s no easy way to make a lot of money fast,” Kamath said.

Online fraud on the rise

In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of UPI, credit or debit card or internet banking related fraud cases in India. A total of 65,893 scams totaling £258.61 million were detected in India in FY2021-22, according to the government. The value of fraud cases increased from ₹244.01m in FY19 and £228.65m in FY20. The three states where banks reported the highest incidences of this type of fraud to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in FY22 were Maharashtra (£86.32 million), Delhi (£27.85) and Karnataka (£21.4 million). million pounds sterling).

“In order to prevent card or online fraud, the RBI has issued various directives regarding bank ATM security measures, ATM/debit card/credit card skimming and SIM swap fraud and loan fraud alerts via the mobile application and hacking customer information from the bank’s server,” the Minister of State at the Treasury said in Parliament last month.