fraud

Open has a feature on crimes gone sour due to stupidity. It's rather amusing to find out that US crims haven't cornered this market. Gems include a man trying to rob the RBI and a trio who chance upon Shahrukh Khan's credit card.

It is common knowledge nowadays that the academic journal industry has largely deteriorated into what can only be termed as a racket. Thousands of journals with shoddy standards have cropped up luring unsuspecting or inept academics and students with the promise of publication.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) apparently already has a team which monitors blogs and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter for stock fraud where manipulators try to influence people to buy certain stocks thereby driving their price up. But it is finding it difficult to perform the same task with Blackberry and WhatsApp messages.

An Economic Times story provides an excellent overview of some of the swindles that have hit India in the last couple of years and metes out some common-sense advice on how to avoid falling afoul of them. It covers the Rs. 24B SpeakAsia scam, the Rs. 11B StockGuru scam, Nigerian 419 scams, and a slew of minor affairs that go unreported.

The RBI has asked all banks to disable the cash retraction facility that is a feature in all ATMs. This facility ensures that if a customer forgets to collect his cash and leaves the ATM, then the machine will suck the currency notes back in and credit the appropriate amount back into the customer's account. However, the RBI has noted that banks were reporting a number of instances where this feature was being abused by frauds: