The Union government launched a campaign asking people not to respond to unknown phone calls and not to share OTPs (One Time Passwords) over phone to prevent cybercrime across the country
| Photo Credit: Representational image
At a time when the Union government is asking people not to respond to unknown phone calls and not to share OTPs (One Time Passwords) over phone to prevent cybercrime across the country, it has become a headache for the ongoing Household Geo-tagging Survey (HGS) team, mandated by the State government here.
In the absence of households, the HGS team members are trying to contact the people concerned through their registered phone numbers, verify them and register them in the government records. For this, they have to send an OTP to the phone number. In such cases, the survey team members have been facing problems in getting the OTP from the registered phone user. The phone users are reluctant to share the OTP due to the fear of cybercrime and doubts their identity.
“Yes, this is the problem we have been facing since the start of our survey in December, 2024. People are not willing to share the OTP with us. So, we are helpless in such a situation. The government should look for some alternative in such cases,” said a survey team member from GVMC ward 46.
Another surveyor from ward 67 said, “Now, every phone number has a special ringtone on cybercrime. The government has instructed telecom operators to turn on a caller tune on every phone. This tune tells phone users not to respond to unknown phone calls or share OTPs over the phone to an unknown phone number. These caller tunes are good and useful for society, but in our case, it makes our work difficult.”
The Centre, through the Department of Telecom, on December 18 had directed the telecom operators to play a cybercrime awareness caller tune 8-10 times a day for three months, a senior police officer said. The caller tunes are provided by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), the cybercrime wing of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.
“To create awareness among the people about cybercrimes through caller tune campaign, it has been decided to play caller tune audios through pre-call announcement/ring back tone arrangement,” the officer added.
Former Rajya Sabha member G.V.L. Narasimha Rao also organised a programme on awareness on rising cybercrime cases, during his Sankranti celebrations event at the AU Engineering College grounds here.
Another survey team member from ward 57 said that people were also not available during Sankranti holidays. So, festive holidays also disrupted their survey. Besides, some people registered with wrong phone numbers and some migrated to other places and their contact and residential addresses changed, he added.
Meanwhile, Visakhapatnam District Collector M.N. Harendhira Prasad recently held a meeting with the senior officials of the survey team and asked them to complete the HGS survey by January 30. He also visited the New Venkojipalem-1 Secretariat under GVMC Zone-3 and inspected the progress of the survey, and also gave some suggestions. But, there was no suggestion about the OTP, revealed a source of the Secretariat.
Published – January 19, 2025 06:26 pm IST
