To provide a safe and secure digital payments ecosystem, the Union Home Ministry under the leadership of the Home Minister Amit Shah has operationalised the National Helpline 155260 for preventing financial loss due to cyber fraud.
The National Helpline and Reporting Platform provides a mechanism for persons cheated in cyber frauds to report such cases to prevent loss of their hard earned money.
The Helpline155260 and its Reporting Platform has been made operational by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Ministry of Home Affairs, with active support and cooperation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), all major banks, payment banks, wallets and online merchants.
The Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System has been developed inhouse by I4C to integrate Law enforcement agencies, banks and financial intermediaries. It is currently being utilized along with 155260 by seven states and union territories (Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh) covering more than 35 percent of the country’s population. Roll out in the other states for pan-national coverage is underway to prevent the flow of money siphoned off by fraudsters.
Victims of cyber fraud call on Helpline Number 155260 is manned and operated by the concerned state police. The police operator notes down the fraud transaction details and basic personal information of the caller and submits them in the form of a ticket on the Citizen Financial Cyber Frauds Reporting and Management System. The ticket gets escalated to the concerned banks, wallets, merchants and so on, depending on whether they are the victim’s bank or the bank/wallet in which the defrauded money has gone.
An SMS is also sent to the victim with an acknowledgement number of the complaint with direction to submit complete details of the fraud on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (https://cybercrime.gov.in/) within 24 hours, using the acknowledgement number.
The concerned bank, which can now see the ticket on its dashboard on the reporting portal, checks the details in its internal systems.
If the defrauded money is still available, the bank puts it on hold, ie., the fraudster cannot withdraw the money. If the defrauded money has moved out to another bank, the ticket gets escalated to the next bank to which the money has moved out. This process is repeated until the money is saved from reaching into the hands of the fraudsters.
Currently, the helpline and its reporting platform has all the major public and private sector banks onboard. These include: State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, Union Bank, IndusInd, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis, Yes, and Kotak Mahindra Bank. It also has all major wallets and merchants such as Paytm, PhonePe, Mobikwik, Flipkart, and Amazon linked to it.
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