This town in Jharkhand is the cyber crime capital of India

Next time you get a “call” from the bank headquarters seeking your debit card details, ask: “Are you calling from Jamtara?” The caller may not respond, but the answer most likely is yes.

This sleepy little district in northeastern Jharkhand has emerged as an unlikely hub of cybercrime in India. It is an obscure town populated by poor farmers, and the homes get barely five hours of electricity a day. Yet, it has gained notoriety as cybercrime hub, even inspiring a popular web series.

Once again, Jamtara comes to the scene as the police in Haryana’s Faridabad have pieced together about a new phishing racket that they suspect has been used to access over 300 nationalised bank and private accounts across five states- Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, West Bengal and Jharkhand.

Police are yet to ascertain the amount of money involved. But they have made five arrests- among the first in a racket involving e-Sim frauds. Four of those five are from Jharkhand’s Jamatra.

According the police, this recent case is unique as the perpetrators use e-SIMs as the main conduit. Through the investigation and from the confessions of perpetrators, police realised that the culprits gain control of bank accounts after obtaining the e-SIMs of victims.

Two years back, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, who himself is a 1982 batch IAS officer from Jharkhand , revealed that Jamatra is identified as new cyber crime hub. According to him, more than half of India’s crimes committed by fraudsters posing as bank managers were traced back to this town.

Thousands of calls are recorded daily at the cellphone towers near these villages. Calls are made to random numbers in search of gullible victims, who will share their debit or credit card details with the “bank official” and end up shockingly witnessing money vanishing from their accounts.

As Jamtara is back, this time in a new e-Sim phishing racket, this is what the police have pieced together the procedures of the scam:

Step 1: Acquire a series of mobile numbers, use all of them to try and log in to a bank account. If a number prompts an OTP, it’s time for the next step.

Step 2: Call the number’s owner and pretend to be customer care executives of the mobile operator offering to upgrade SIM cards or Know Your Customer (KYC) details. Gain trust, obtain the victim’s email ID.

Step 3: Send an email to the victim containing text to be sent to the official customer care number. It’s a ruse to register your email ID with the victim’s number, so that you can put in an official request to convert the SIM into an e-SIM. Once done, the victim’s phone number and everything else it’s linked to, including the bank account, is under your control.