Finance ministry on Friday met fintechs and banks such as Punjab National Bank (PNB) and State Bank of India (SBI), and officials from various government departments, to discuss the ways to tackle increasing incidents of recent online financial frauds.
The meeting was chaired by Vivek Joshi, secretary, department of financial services, and involved officials from department of revenue, telecom regulatory authority of India (Trai), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Indian Cyber Crime Co-ordination Center (I4C), National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), among others.
Banks and financial institutions are required to phase out the use of regular 10-digit numbers and use specific number series such as ‘140xxx’ for commercial/ promotional activities as prescribed by TRAI, the finance ministry said.
Some of the issues that were discussed included, onboarding of banks/ financial institutions on the Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System (CFCFRMS) platform through API integration. Further, formulating an action plan/ SoPs for returning of funds to the victim from fraudulent accounts, was also discussed among stakeholders.
Lately, the department of telecommunications (DoT) also blocked about 140,000 mobile handsets either linked to the disconnected mobile connections or misused in cyber-crime /financial frauds. DoT has analysed 3.5 million principal entities sending bulk SMSs.