The cyber police have been seeing cases where cyber criminals change their victims’ SIM card to ensure that they don’t get bank alerts for more than a year now. Cyber expert Vijay Mukhi said most customers in such cases are “sitting ducks”. “Cyber criminals know it is easy to get a person’s details and they have begun exploiting it. Banks and service providers need to take the issue of security very seriously. If this trend continues, the government will have to come up with some stringent legislation to prevent it.”

Officers at the cyber cell at of BKC police station said criminals are known to change their modus operandi frequently, to be a step ahead of security procedures, and started deactivating their victims’ SIM cards as more and more banks started sending text alerts to their customers about bank transactions.

“Earlier, criminals would hack into networks to get passwords, using which they would make online transfers. The banks then started alerting customers through SMS, which helped investigations,” said an officer, requesting anonymity. “To get around this, criminals now request for a new SIM card [of the bank customer] by producing forged identity documents to the mobile service provider before committing the crime.”

Thus, the customer does not get an SMS alert about the money transferred.