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With the rise of the new ‘Jamtara Model’ where scammers are impersonating government officials to extort money from citizens, the Delhi Police has joined hands with caller ID verification platform Truecaller to verify official contact numbers of the Delhi police.

This will help citizens identify verified numbers and protect themselves from scams made in the name of government officials, they said.

The Delhi police has signed an MoU with the platform to help “the public identify verified numbers and distance themselves from cyber frauds and scams relating to impersonation in the name of government officials,”, it said, as per ANI.

In addition to educating Delhiites and holding a joint awareness campaign against cyber frauds, Truecaller will help display the official numbers of the Delhi Police representatives on the app’s government directory services, the Delhi police had said earlier in February, as per PTI.

“During the Covid pandemic, Truecaller had helped us a lot because there were a lot of scams and frauds reported then on the pretext of selling oxygen cylinders, concentrators, medicines, and other essentials associated with the treatment of the deadly virus. So, then our officials identified the number of those fraudsters and alerted Truecaller which displayed those unverified numbers as spam,” Suman Nalwa, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Public Relations Officer), told PTI in February.

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Noting how fraudsters have several times posed as government officials, Nalwa said that all official contact numbers of the Delhi police will be verified. “All verified numbers of Delhi Police will have a green badge and a blue tick mark, with a government service tag highlighting that it has been verified for users.”

“As per the MoU, we will have to share our official contact numbers for inclusion in the government directory services feature. We will also need to alert Truecaller about the latest cybercrime threats and trends and share numbers on spam or scam regularly,” Nalwa said.

The Delhi police’s move comes as more and more cases of scamsters impersonating government officials to extort money surface.

A Twitter user, Geetika Rustagi, recently shared a thread on the app of how a group of people coordinated to try and scam her over a WhatsApp call pretending to be FedEx customer care operators as well as Mumbai police officials.

Earlier this month, a homemaker in West Bengal’s Bidhannagar was allegedly scammed by fraudsters who had saved their phone number as that of “Bidhannagar Cyber Crime police” in the Truecaller app and extorted money from her threatening arrest.

Three men were arrested for allegedly cheating the homemaker, the Telegraph reported.

In February, a 22-year-old Indian based in Italy was arrested for allegedly posing as the Vice President of India by creating a fake WhatsApp account using Jagdeep Dhankhar’s picture as his profile display to dupe people and seek favours from senior bureaucrats, as per PTI.

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