A month ago, father of a student of Dhaka University’s Department of Finance received a phone call claiming that his son had been arrested with yaba, a contraband addictive tablet. The caller also played what sounded exactly like his son’s voice, crying and pleading for help. A police siren could be heard during the call.
The student’s mother was ill at the time. The caller told the father, “His mother is ill, so I am calling you.”
The father had little reason to suspect anything was wrong. After the caller demanded Tk2 lakh to free his son, he negotiated the amount and deposited Tk30,555 into a mobile financial services account. A few hours later, when his son returned home, the father spoke with him and realised that he had fallen victim to a scam.
TIMES has learnt of several such scams targeting Dhaka University students and their parents. In each case, the caller uses a voice identical to that of the person being referred to, making it sound as if they are crying or pleading for help. The fraudsters then demand money, which is collected through mobile financial services accounts.
Victims say the parents of students living in university halls or residences have been targeted, raising serious concerns that students’ data or personal information may be leaking from some source.
Although some victim families have complained to police, university authorities have been reluctant to take the initiative to investigate the matter.
Talking to TIMES, another victim said his mother received a call on August 25 from people claiming to be members of the Detective Branch of police.
“They said that my friend and I had been caught with yaba. They then said that your son is not at fault. However, they demanded money and talked in a threatening tone,” the student said on condition of anonymity.
His mother, being elderly, was unable to understand what was happening. There was also the issue of protecting her son’s reputation. The fraudsters initially took Tk30,000 and later received more money.
During the call with his mother, the fraudsters spoke in a voice exactly like his and pretended that he was crying, apparently to make her more sympathetic.
TIMES spoke to Mustak Ahmed, additional director of the university’s ICT Cell, at his office on Sunday. He claimed their data centre had not been hacked.
Asked how fraudsters were then obtaining students’ personal information and their parents’ phone numbers, he said such information was held by various other offices.
“It is not possible to determine exactly how the mobile numbers of students and their parents are reaching outsiders,” he said, adding that the Office of the Controller of Examinations also held a large amount of information, which could potentially be leaked from there.
However, an employee of that office said there had been no hacking or data leak in their system.
Mustak also claimed that the ICT Cell had not received any complaints of such fraud.
Mashnun Alam Snigdha, a student of the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, disagreed with his claim.
“It is not just the students’ personal information; the fraudsters are also obtaining phone numbers of their parents. It is necessary to conduct an urgent technical audit to determine whether the source of the information is any digital platform or system of the university,” she told TIMES.
If evidence of a leak from any university system were found, he said, action should be taken against those responsible. Even if there had been no data leak, the university administration needed to take stricter and more effective measures to ensure the security of students’ personal information, he added.
A female student who was also a victim of the scam said, “At first, they used such precise information to deceive me that I suspected someone close to me or someone living around me might have been involved. But after seeing similar incidents involving many people at the university, I felt that our personal information had been leaked. Otherwise, this would not have been possible.”
Students are now living in fear over the use of voice cloning and personal information to deceive their families. They said such incidents had been occurring for the past two months.
University Proctor Md Israfil Ratan is aware of the incidents. Yusuf Harun, office assistant of Proctor Office, and the son of Professor Azharul Islam Sheikh, dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, had also been targeted in similar fashions, he told TIMES.
Asked what the university was doing, the proctor said they were trying to raise awareness and improve their technological capabilities so that the fraudsters could be identified.
“When we approached the police about this, they told us that such crimes were being committed through ID cloning and that police were preparing to take strict action in this regard,” he said.
The father of the Finance Department student, who paid over Tk30,000 to the fraudsters, filed a general diary (GD) with Sher-e-Bangla Nagar Police Station. Sub-Inspector Zahidul Hasan was assigned to investigate the GD.
The student and his father told TIMES that more than three weeks had passed since the GD was filed, but the investigating officer had not informed them of any progress.
The complaint that police have been indifferent to such cases is not new, particularly when a GD does not attract much attention. There have been numerous instances in which GDs were treated merely as a formal procedure.
The student said that, after receiving no information from police, they contacted the company operating the mobile financial services account to which they had sent the money. After lodging a complaint, they were told that only Tk630 remained in the account.
Although the family managed to trace the number, police could not take any immediate action. “Since voice cloning was involved, it is difficult to identify the perpetrators,” Sub-Inspector Zahidul Hasan told TIMES.
He said the complaint would be forwarded to the police cybercrime team.
“These days, voice cloning is not difficult. Anyone can record a voice during a call and clone it,” said Fahim Mashrur, a technology expert and chief executive officer of bdjobs.
Asked how the data of so many students could be leaked, he said, “Hacking is not even necessary for a leak. Every department has information about its students. Any employee could leak it from there. The information could also be used when photocopying identity cards.”
