Hyderabad man loses Rs 1 lakh for filing Income Tax return online through fake website

Hyderabad : In a new case of cyber crime, a Hyderabad man lost nearly 1 lakh rupees while filing his Income Tax return online. Rachakonda cyber crime police said that the victim apparently received a link for filing ITR that took him to a fake website, ending up extracting the money.

“We suspect more such cases in the coming weeks as the I-T returns for this year are due to be filed by July 31. Apart from the victim, his colleagues had received similar emails. We frequently get complaints about people getting duped after they log onto a fake website,” said S Harinath, assistant commissioner of police (Cyber Crime), Rachakonda.

Several other verbal and written complaints of cyber crimes have also been noted by the police.

“Most of the cases involve very less amount of money and so the victim does not file an FIR. Only when the amount is in lakhs, people lodge a police complaint,” he added.

“People need to pay more attention to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) before making any payments on such websites. We know how the real homepage looks like. So, we do not check the URL. There are several fake websites that look exactly the same as the original but the URL will be different. Like ‘www.facebook-.com’ might be ‘faceb00k.com’. Though the letter ‘o’ has been replaced by zero, people fail to check such small details,” he said.

NOTE: Last date to file income tax returns is July 31 for the financial year 2018-19.