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“Your dog has died…”: Actor narrates wild tale scammer narrated to extort money
Sahiba Bali was speaking at a roundtable organised by telecom operator Airtel to discuss the network's newly launched “spam fighting” technology.
Actress Sahiba Bali narrated an incident when a scam caller allegedly tried to extort money from her under the guise of providing medical treatment to her injured pet dog. But the surprising fact is, the actress said that she got this call almost two years after her dog had passed away!
Bali said the caller informed her that her pet dog has been ran over by a car and admitted to a nearby morgue with a critical injury. The caller persuaded the actress to send money so that he could send the animal in an ambulance.
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She declined the call, only to be called again informing that it could be someone else's dog from her neighbourhood and Bali was persuaded again to send money. “This was a very weird conversation and the third time he called me I realised it was a scam,” said the actress.
What Airtel claims?
She was speaking at a roundtable organised by telecom operator Airtel to discuss the network's newly launched spam fighting technology. Tech influencers Rajiv Makhni, Technical Guruji aka Gaurav Chaudhary, journalist Faye D'Souza, actor Asish Vidyarthi, comedian Rohan Joshi were in attendance.
Also read | How to avoid digital arrest scams? Centre's advisory as frauds rise across India
The attendees talked about their personal spam and scam stories and a “game-changing move” launched by Airtel to tackle the rising menace of spam calls.
Airtel claims to have launched the industry first network wide spam fighting solution to detect spam calls and SMS in less than 2 milli seconds.
Also read | Airtel’s spam curbs need work, big Truecaller update looms, and Meta’s ambitions
“We have implemented a solution that displays Suspected Spam calls/SMS received by Airtel customers in real time on their phone. This is done via AI-based technology that uses network intelligence. The identification of Suspected Spam calls / SMS relies on the usage pattern, frequency, call duration, use of suspicious URLs, IMEI and 250+derived parameters, that help determine the spam behaviour and is available for customers using a VoLTE enabled smartphone,” reads a Q&A on the company's website.
