Airport Lounge Scam: Woman Loses ₹87,000!

A woman allegedly lost Rs 87,000 in a suspected scam at Bengaluru airport while trying to access an airport lounge.

Reportedly, the woman did not possess her physical credit card and she showed a photo of it to gain access. The security staff at the lounge asked her to download an app and complete a facial screening for safety purpose.

She did as she was asked to do but then realized it was a scam upon receiving her credit card bill.

It is learnt that on September 29, after she downloaded the “Lounge Pass” app, she never used the lounge but had coffee at Starbucks.

A few days after the trip, she noticed that friends and family couldn’t reach her on phone. She thought it was due to some network issue with Airtel, which she faced earlier too.

However, she became anxious when someone told her that a male voice was answering her calls.

Then she found that Rs 87,000 had been charged on her credit card and transferred to a PhonePe account. Suspecting that the scammers accessed her phone through the app, enabling call forwarding and then intercepted her OTPs to conduct unauthorized transactions.

In her video which went viral, she said that they accessed her phone setting through screen sharing, set up call forwarding, and blocked her from receiving calls. She said that she did not know how many OTPs the scammers intercepted.

In response to the crisis, she filed a complaint with the cybercrime department and also informed her bank officials. Later, she blocked the card.

Surprisingly, the woman said that she uses an iPhone, which is considered more secure against such scams. She shared her story on social media and alerted netizens about the threat to credit cards and other transactions even in seemingly secure environments like airports.

This incident shows that cyber crimes are surging by the day.