Thousands Of People Became Victims Of This SMS Russian Scam

Even when you are cautious, it is still easy to be involved in online frauds. Scamming emails can sound extremely convincing to amateurs. So when we inform you that there a new Income Tax Scam happening in India, you need to read carefully.

A freelance communications consultant working at a digital marketing firm, Karthik Srinivasan, posted a strange story on his Twitter account today. In the post, he described that he received an SMS, assumably from the Income Tax department. The message read that he was qualified for a tax refund.

This is obviously a convincing message which he found nothing to be suspicious about. And further investigation doesn’t show any mistakes that might be an alert for a scam. Fortunately, Srinivasan remembered the Bitly tool which allows users to reverse a shortened link and search where it’s originated from. By using this tool, Srinivasan found out that the URL led people to a Russian website. The URL was only created the previous day.

In just one day, from the number of the clicks, it is certain that the scam URL has succeeded in scamming over 4,000 people. Among those people, 3,869 are from India.

Another user from Twitter responded to Srinivasan’s tweeting, saying that they had already clicked on the URL. That user also posted an image of the scamming site. To be honest, it is an extremely well-polished site pretending to be an SBI’s portal. Through this website, hackers can steal the victim’s details like name, mobile number, PAN number as well as their bank account.

And this is exactly the reason why you need to be cautious no matter how convincing and authentic a message might look. At least, from this article, there a few tricks you can learn to track the original destination of URLs to see if it is a scam or not.