DH Photo/Prarthan D R
At least three ride hailers in Bengaluru have run into a scary new problem — the moment they hail a ride on Ola, someone calls them up impersonating the driver.
Earlier this week, a 25-year-old woman was trying to book a cab from
M G Road to Cunningham Road. While the app was still finding a ride, she received a call from a man claiming to be the cab driver.
“He asked if I was near the metro station, took my drop location, and said that he would be arriving soon. I was confused because the app was not showing that the driver had accepted the ride. When I asked him about this, he said it might be a network problem and it happens often,” she says.
It was only later that she found that she had received a scam call. “After waiting for five minutes, I got a notification from Ola that my ride had been booked. I went on the app and called the driver to ask what was taking him so long. This time, the driver was confused and he told me ‘I just accepted your ride. I haven’t called you’,” she says. The scammer knew her exact location, which she found scary.
Rani (name changed), a hotel management student from Yeshwanthpur, received a similar call. “Luckily, I had Truecaller installed on my phone, so I was alerted as it said ‘Ola Fraud’. It is creepy to think that someone knows exactly when I’m opening the app to book an auto,” she says.
Such incidents have left citizens checking their data permissions on apps such as Ola. “It is no coincidence that I got the call exactly when I was booking an auto on the app,” adds Rani.
What you can do
Pranav M Bidare, researcher, Centre for Internet and Society, says, “It could be a person within the company sharing the number with outsiders. Or it could be a group that has targeted a vulnerability in the company’s database.”
He lists two more possibilities. “A lot of people who use smartphones don’t pay attention to the security of the information stored on the phone and how the security is managed. Often this leads to various applications having access to data on the phone without the user’s knowledge. So this could be one of the ways the data is being misused. Plus, there is also the possibility that individual phones have been hacked, but that seems unlikely in this case,” he elaborates.
Bidare calls for better awareness with regard to data management, especially among elders. “An awareness campaign will be especially effective if it comes directly from the company. This way, it reaches more people and users take it seriously,” he says.
He has a few suggestions on how to protect your data: “Although applications like Truecaller have their shortcomings, they can be useful in such situations. It reveals a crowdsourced caller ID, and it can help track scammers. Users should also make it a point to routinely check data permissions and updates.”
Social media influencers and Reddit users have begun to talk about the problem. Ola officials did not respond to Metrolife’s questions.
Police say…
The city police have not received any complaints of impersonators using ride-hailing apps. “Citizens facing such problems can always file complaints with us. It is also important for them to stick to the information provided on the app and not respond to calls from unknown numbers,” Srinivas Gowda, deputy commissioner of police (crime), says.