Northeast India Students Becoming Scam and Fraud Victims

Kohima, Jul 30 : Apart from fraudsters cheating the gullible public of the Northeast through SMS and e-mail making lucrative offer of money, many young people from the region, particularly from Nagaland and Mizoram, are became victims of bank frauds.

Reserve Bank of India has found that dormant or hardly used bank accounts and debit cards of students from remote areas of Nagaland and Mizoram studying outside the region were used for transactions by such fraudsters.

Disclosing this, RBI regional manager Surekha Marandi told newsmen here that fraudsters are targeting account holders of banks in remote locations in Nagaland and Mizoram, particularly students, to allow their accounts and debit cards to be used by them for depositing and withdrawing money.

Although the account holders of such transactions become party to crime, in most cases the young people whose account numbers were used by the fraudsters failed to foresee the legal consequences of such transactions mainly due to lack of awareness, she said.

“A person allowing a fraudster to use his account for committing fraud in banking parlance is called a mule,” she cautioned and called upon the account holders to immediately report to bank branches or police if one found such transitions or lost his/her debit card.