Hello folks! One of my friend had a fallen for scam yesterday and she lost approximately Rs 25,000. She got an email on her personal email-id from CEO’s name asking for help and coincidentally they had talked in the morning. So she thought that he needed help with some transaction as he was an NRI and it could happen that transactions were failing. The email said that he needed to pay money for the vendor. She transferred the money and pinged the CEO on his WhatsApp number that she has done the transaction. The CEO replied that he never told to do such transaction. That’s when she checked in detail and found that the CEO’s name was same but the email-id was something very random. Surprisingly Gmail also marked the email as important. She contacted the bank in 10 mins and told them everything. They gave her a complaint number and told that they have frozen the account since it was from the same bank. We went to the bank and found that the money was immediately moved via UPI to some other online platform. The bank said that they will do physical verification of the address and suggested us to go to the police. We went to police filed a complaint. Police also told us to file a complaint on cybercrime.gov.in. Both and bank and police feel there isn’t much they can do to recover the money as in these cases the address are sometimes wrong and the person is almost untraceable. I asked the bank if they can help in recovering as RBI does say that they provide some protection against online frauds. But they said this case is different as we have transferred the money on our own. If this would have happened via Debit card or OTP then could have helped to recover the money. But in this case there is almost no hope. The bank said that they could have recovered if the account had cyber protection insurance which she didn’t had. Does anybody know any way that can help her recover the amount? Thanks 🙏

If you ever get scammed, check out RBI's portal. RBI does some amazing work to ensure customer safety in India. I've worked in the payments team of a big fintech. Nothing got traction in the company like a mail from RBI.