2020 is infamous for multiple reasons. Nidhi Razdan, formerly the executive editor at NDTV and a prime anchor of the news channel’s multiple shows would not want to remember (or would not be able to forget) 2020 because of what happened to her in a short span of one year. In January 2020, she received an offer from Harvard University to join there as an Associate Professor for journalism (at least that’s what she thought), and thus she resigned from NDTV in June 2020 ending her 21-year stint with the channel. But she was told her joining process was being delayed due to COVID-19. It was only in January 2021 when she wrote a mail to the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences that she realized the people she had been interacting with all this while weren’t from Harvard, instead they were fraudsters and she had been a victim of phishing and the fraudsters were able to access her personal data in the whole act. When the whole issue was shared online by Nidhi, it was the talk of the town for a long time. But maybe (except for Nidhi) we didn’t realize the gravity of this matter back then. And so now we have another such case.
Harshita Kejriwal, daughter of Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi (the capital of India), has been a victim of online fraud on Olx. While she was attempting to sell her old sofa online, a fraudster contacted her posing as a genuine seller and gained her confidence. That did the trick for him, as he shared two QR codes of GPay with her and as she scanned those codes, she lost Rs. 20,000 and Rs. 14,000 respectively. This incident again being a high profile case has been highlighted in the media. But they aren’t the only victims. I’ve personally been approached by fraudsters twice on Olx. I somehow realized it before I lost any money to them but not everybody would have been as lucky as me.
So who’s responsible for ensuring the security in these incidences? I still wonder why Harvard University didn’t react back in June 2020 even though Nidhi had talked about getting a job offer from them on air. They surely must have heard about it too. Also, even though these applications like Olx and GPay have facilitated ease of transaction, they have done so for fraudsters as well. These fraudsters prey on the gullibility of innocent people and make easy money by duping them. Shouldn’t these companies put an extra layer of protection in their process? Are these companies not aware of these cases of fraud? I believe they are. So shouldn’t they be doing something about it? I noticed that Olx flags whenever any person types suspicious words while interacting with others and blocks such people from being on the platform. But is that enough? I don’t think it is. Unless we have more layers of security and we bring in measures where transactions become safer, these incidents will only rise. We might get to hear about them only if it happens to someone very famous or somebody close to us becomes its victim. But whenever we will hear about it, we will become more scared to use these platforms in the future.
Olx, GPay guys, are you listening? You stand to lose your customers in the coming days if you don’t act soon enough.
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