Bengaluru woman loses Rs 25,000 after ordering food online, scammer pretends to be food delivery app employee

The last few months have seen a sharp rise in online scam cases in India and there have been ample cases where innocent victims lost their hard-earned money to fraudsters. Some of these common scams involved liking YouTube videos for money, getting assigned tasks through Telegram, and fake work from home job offers. However, a new type of scam has surfaced in a recent incident and if you often order food from various delivery apps, you must stay vigilant.

According to a report in Business Today, a woman in Bengaluru ordered food from a food delivery app and ended up losing Rs 25,000 after a scammer pretended to be an employee from the app. Read on to know what exactly happened and how you must stay safe.

Bengaluru woman loses Rs 25,000

As per the report, 64-year-old Shilpa Sarnobat, a resident of Bengaluru's Nagawara area, ordered food via a food delivery app on August 6. However, minutes after placing the order, she decided to cancel it. The delivery app charged her for the cancelation, as per the report. A day later, on August 8, Sarnobat received a call from an unknown number. The person on the other side of the call said that he is from customer care of the concerned food delivery app and wants to issue a refund of the cancelation fees to the woman.

After confirming order details, the woman trusted the caller, thinking that he really is from the food delivery app's customer service team. In order to get the refund, she downloaded an application on his instructions and shared her bank details with him. Shortly after this, the woman got a notification saying that Rs 25,000 had been withdrawn from her bank account.

When she tried calling the individual, there was no response. This is when the woman realised that she had been duped. A complaint was filed at the local police station.

How to stay safe?

Online scams, as mentioned above, are happening at an alarming rate. But to stay safe from such scams, there are a couple of things that we can keep in mind. First, never trust anybody online and refrain from giving you personal and banking information to anyone. Just because somebody says they are an employee at a bank, or a company, doesn't mean they are telling the truth. Perform a thorough background check of the person and only continue talking if they surely are who they claim to be.

Next, never download an application to get refunds. Food delivery apps and shopping stores process refunds directly to the source account usually. They will never ask you to download any app for the same.

Also, never transfer money to accounts you don't know anything about and always safeguard your bank OTPs.

Keeping these simple steps in mind might help you identify if the person at the other end of a phone is a scammer or not.