Bengaluru, 10 December 2022: “Open this link and update your KYC or your xxx bank account will be blocked”. How many times we all have received such phishing messages on SMS and email from unknown numbers! And unknowingly many also mistakenly believe that the links are sent by their respective banks for updation of personal details and click on those only to fall prey to a virus/ cyber-attack / cyber-crime which costs them money or crashing of phone resulting in loss of data.
Realizing the need to prevent these type of phishing messages and to educate the masses ClearTrust has launched a Whatsapp ChatBot called AskMeera.
Explaining about the ChatBot, Founders of ClearTrust, AskMeera, Deepankar Biswas and Raja TN said “All you need to do is every time you get a suspicious message that seems like spam, WhatsApp the said message to AskMeera ChatBot and you can confirm if it is a genuine message. What goes behind the Chatbot is of course technology that verifies if the message is actually from the sender and alerts you if it is spurious.”
“It is a free service launched as a citizen safety initiative with the objective of cleansing the digital ecosystem and reducing the number of phishing attacks in the country,” they further explained.
Post-COVID-19, technology took over our lives. While it has its own advantages that we enjoy, it’s also an opportunity for fraudsters to commit crimes in the strangest way possible. One such way of committing online fraud is through phishing attacks. This largely involves obtaining personal or financial information from users and employing it to commit cybercrimes, harming the digital goodwill of the individual. There have been reports of fraudsters impersonating government department officials, or bank officials, sending unfaithful messages with malware-attached links, and robbing people off their hard-earned money and reputation across the country.
“Being a WhatsApp ChatBot, it does not require any separate installation. A user must simply save the WhatsApp number and use it to interact in case of receiving a suspicious message(s). Any form of a text message can be easily verified on the platform. All it takes is a series of 4 steps to shield against phishing attacks,” the founders concluded.