WhatsApp and phone scams have become so pervasive that the government has been forced to play warning messages before all phone calls, and it turns out that even top CEOs aren’t immune.
Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has shared screenshots of someone looking to scam him by pretending to be Sharma himself. It appears that the scammer got a hold of the phone number of someone senior in the Paytm management, and attempted to scam them while pretending to be Vijay Shekhar Sharma. It turns out the number belonged to Sharma himself.
“I am Vijay Shekhar Sharma. This is my new Whatsapp number, save it” the scammer messaged Sharma on WhatsApp. He’d added a photo of Vijay Shekhar Sharma as his WhatsApp DP for good measure.
Sharma played along with the scam. “Absolutely sir,” he replied in Hindi.
“Are you in the company now?” the scammer asked him. “Yes,” Sharma replied.
“I’m in a meeting right now and I want you to do something for me,” the scammer told Sharma.
The scammer then asked Sharma to check the company accounts to determine how much “funds” were available, and asked Sharma to send him a picture. Sharma continued to play along, and said that he wasn’t with the finance department, so he wouldn’t know. The scammer then asked him who was “on duty” in the finance department, to which Sharma asked him to talk to them directly. The scammer then said that his phone had been recently formatted, and he’d lost their numbers.
Now this was clearly an extremely incompetent scammer, who not only messaged the CEO while pretending to be the CEO, and didn’t seem to really know how large companies operated. But there are much more sophisticated scammers out there who’re impersonating people and managing to scam their hapless victims of lakhs of rupees. These scammers usually pretend to be someone known to the victim, and get them to transfer large sums of money either directly or through Apple and Amazon gift cards. And while Sharma had the advantage of having his scammer accidentally pretend to be himself which ended the ruse before it began, his experience is yet another reminder to people about being cautious of messages from unknown numbers which end up asking for money.