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New Cellphone Scam

Playing a prank for free balance

City Correspondent
Just after midnight, Uttara resident Iftekhar Haque was jolted out of his peaceful sleep as his cellphone rang. Groggy eyed and irritated, Iftekhar fuzzily answered the phone.
"I accidentally refilled 50 taka in your number," said the unknown caller. "Could you retransfer the money to my number? I would appreciate that."
The creaky voice was rather polite and apologetic. Iftekhar agreed to the request.
As he was about to transfer the balance, Iftekhar suddenly remembered that he did not receive any notifications about account refills ih his mobile phone.
He intuitively checked his mobile phone account balance and found that he had the same balance as the last time he checked a few hours ago.
Iftekhar, a private university student, felt he should inform the person about the confusion and tried to call him a few times. But no one bothered to answer
his call. Annoyed with the unexpected late night ordeal, he decided to get back to sleep.
“At that time I was quite convinced that he was telling the truth, but the next morning I realised that he was probably playing a prank on me to get some free balance on his cellphone account," Iftekhar told this correspondent.
Many would agree that phone calls like these are quite frequent these days.
Some forgetful mobile phone users do it to retrieve the call-
time balance that was inadvertently transferred to another number. However, it is the fraudsters that mobile phone subscribers should be wary about.
"While refilling their mobile phone account, a lot of people mistakenly submit a wrong number with one or two incorrect digits. Getting that money back is a rather tricky procedure," said Hasib Mahmud, a customer manager of Grameenphone.
“A lot of people contact the number where the money has been sent and request the owner to retransfer the balance," he said adding, "But using this as an excuse, unscrupulous people try to convince other mobile users to transfer the call time balance."
Over the past six months Jalil Ahmed, a Mohammadpur resident, has received such phone calls on several occasions as he uses more than one numbers.
"I received similar phone calls quite a few times and every single of them turned out to be prank calls," he said.
"Some people do it just for fun. The first time I got such a call, I later found that my account was unchanged. Then 1 called the person back and accused him of playing a prank on me. When I asked him why did he do such a thing, he simply told me that he felt like doing it and thought it would be fun."
However, Ruksana Khanam, a housewife from Khilgaon, naively trusted a fraudster and transferred balance to his number. "He was really convincing.
His number was almost identical to mine except for a couple of digits," she said.
There are also other forms of hoax calls.
Earlier last month, an unknown caller contacted Tasnim Bashir in his cellphone. The caller told Tasnim that he has won a prize ofTk 2 lakh.
"He told me that I would need to transfer Tk 600 balance to his number immediately to claim my prize," said Tasnim, a schoolteacher from Dhanmondi. "Although he was pretty convincing, I knew it was a prank and I cut off the connection."
A spokesman for the mobile phone company that Tasnim subscribes said that these cases have increased a lot in recent times.
"It is really startling to see people resorting to all these hoaxes to earn some extra call time in their phones considering the fact that we have all sorts of exciting offers of bonus call times forthem," he said.
"People should check whether there has been any unexpected transfers made in his account. There has to be a notification of some sort. Many people take the callers' words for granted and send the money without verifying the transfer," he said.
As for people who have inadvertently transferred money in another number, they should contact the customer service of his mobile phone operator and inform the mistake immediately, he added.