Ayushi Mehta
The life with the internet is day by day getting connected more and more online, which has benefited us a lot and made our lives much better, the negative sides that come along with it are just as much. The number of scams and frauds happening online is seen increasing with every passing day. Yet another scam joining this list is the fake Paytm scam. Here the fraudsters are sending a link to the users with a message or a notification saying that they have won a big cash prize, and unfortunate of some people that think that this is actually true and fall into the trap of the fraudsters.
In this scam where the fraudsters pretend to be a Paytm site, the scammers send a random Chrome notification or a ‘pop-up’ to the users that states “Congratulations! You have won Paytm Scratch Card.”
The first thing to always keep in mind, according to IT experts that these types of notifications claiming a cashback should never be taken seriously. Most of the time, they are just tricks that the scammers and the fraudsters use to steal the hard-earned money of the people and their personal information that includes card details, emails, and other account information.
A lot of people are easily falling into the trap of this scam. When they click the notification, the users are redirected to a page called ‘paytm-cashoffer.com’, which is not the official website of Paytm. This is one of the signs that a fraud is being committed. Identifying of such types of websites gets hard sometimes as they are made so similarly to the original and official website of the company. The URL, however is mostly different from the official website.
The cashback offer that pops up claims that the user have won ₹2,647. The website will then ask you to add this amount in the Paytm wallet. Once you click the ‘Send’ button, you will be directed to the official Paytm app or the website where you will be asked to ‘Pay’ rather than accept the amount. People sometimes fail to notice that that is a pay button and not a accept cashback reward button.
People sometimes click Pay and then ₹2.647 is deducted from their accounts.
This is not the first time such a scam is performed to trick the users. These types of incidents happened a lot of times in the past.