Over time, the problem of scamming has increased tremendously. With the launch of 5G, many cases of SIM swapping are coming to the fore these days in which scammers are cheating you through your SIM. Let us know about it in detail. (Jagran photo)

When you do a transaction or make a payment somewhere or subscribe to a service, companies send OTP to your phone number, which confirms that this number is yours. But what if your OTP is going to be a scammer? Yes, nowadays one such problem is coming up, in which scammers swap your SIM and take your number with them. After all, what is this sim swapping, let's know about it?

What is Sim Swapping?

In the last few days, many cases of illegal SIM swapping have come to the fore, due to which people have lost money, sometimes in lakhs. SIM swapping has become a new modus operandi of cyber criminals as an effective way of doing two-step verification in the past.

In SIM swapping, a cyber criminal duplicate your SIM card. However, to do so they need access to your personalized data like ID, phone number and full name, email ID, date of birth, etc., which they use for regular phishing techniques.

They can then contact your mobile operator and get a duplicate of your SIM over the phone or the internet or even by visiting a physical store. Once they have the duplicate SIM, they can also get OTP for the user's bank account and verification, etc.

More than 1700 attacks happen every week

According to the Check Point Threat Intelligence report, an organization in India has been attacked an average of 1783 times per week in the last 6 months. These attacks are carried out to steal personal data, which can then be used by cybercriminals. In addition, India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) reports that the total number of phishing incidents in India has increased from 280 in 2020 to 523 in 2021, as the number of ransomware attacks has also increased.

How to avoid sim swapping?

Explain that when your SIM is duplicated by a scammer, then the mobile signal in your phone will completely disappear. This is because your SIM card no longer has access to the mobile network. You will now be unable to make and receive calls and text messages.

Your data is the information that cyber criminals need to copy your SIM. This is why be careful about the websites you visit.