Woman Downloads App to Get Lounge Access at Bengaluru Airport, Loses Over Rs 87,000

A woman lost over Rs 87,000 in a possible scam at Bengaluru Airport when she tried to access the lounge before her flight. Since she didn’t carry her credit cards, she showed a photo of one to gain access. The lounge staff then asked her to download an app and undergo a face screening for security purposes. She followed the instructions but realised the scam only after receiving her credit card bill.

Despite downloading the “Lounge Pass” app on September 29, the woman never used the lounge facilities. She instead grabbed a coffee at Starbucks before her flight.

A few days after her trip, people told her that they were unable to reach her by phone. Initially, she blamed this on Airtel’s network issues, which she had been experiencing for months. “With Airtel’s horrible connection for the last couple of months, I assumed that it was because of poor signals. Then somebody told me why is a male picking up your phone,” the woman in the now-viral video said.

This did ring a bell but she brushed it off at the time as she was preoccupied with a family situation at the hospital. It wasn’t until she found out that over Rs 87,000 had been charged to her credit card and transferred to a PhonePay account.

She now suspects that the scammers accessed her phone through the app, enabling call forwarding and possibly intercepting OTPs to complete unauthorised transactions.

“This lounge pass app that they asked me to download, the screen sharing. They have gone into my phone, gotten to my settings, they have done a call-forwarding, so I didn’t get any calls. I don’t know how many of my OTPs they have access to and how much of it is possible”, she explained.

She has since filed a complaint with cybercrime department, informed her bank, HDFC, and blocked her card.

Watch the video here:

In a separate incident, 59 people in Hong Kong ended up losing Rs 2 crore in a naked video chat scam. The police shared that the victims were honey-trapped by extortionists on the internet and eventually lured to remove their clothes during video chats. After this, these footage were used by the scammers to blackmail victims, forcing them to pay more than HK$1.9 million (over Rs 2 crore) to avoid leaking private videos online or sending them to their families. The Hong Kong police issued an advisory for people to be cautious of such scams.