RECENTLY, I received a call from a Universal Access Number (UAN) of the bank where I have an account. I could not respond to the first two calls. I searched it on the internet and found that it was my bank’s telephone number.

When I received the call from the same number again, I responded. There was a man on the other side who said my account was being blocked, and told that if I wanted to continue my account, I had to cooperate with him.

He said he had sent a number to my phone and I had to read out the number to him. As soon as I did that, he hung up. As I soon came to know, much to my grief, that he first changed the password of my digital bank account, and then transferred money to a digital wallet, leaving a mere Rs16 in the account.

How did he access my bank account, I wonder. It is so frustrating to think that the information of an international Islamic bank’s customer is not safe. How would a customer know if the person on the other side of the call is a bank official or otherwise when he is calling from the actual bank number?

When I realised that I had been scammed, I went to the nearest bank branch, and informed the officials that their number was being used for fraudulent purposes.

The reply of the bank staff was amazingly cruel. “It is a matter of only a few thousand rupees. People have lost millions of rupees,” they told me in response before getting busy with their own things.

Was it a reasonable answer? The office of the banking ombudsman, I guess, would like to take a look at such affairs.

Imama Khalid
Hyderabad

Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2023