Kolkata: Bengal and Kolkata have hotspots where fraudulent transactions are more compare to other areas. This was disclosed by Gaurav Gupta, group head-financial crime intelligence of Axis Bank. He was in the city along with Sameer Shetty, group head digital business, transformation and strategic programmes of Axis Bank and Reynold D’Souza, group head branch banking to discuss banks initiative on safe banking. According to him, the banks accordingly enhance vigilance in hotspots.
Gupta said that the number of mule accounts which are generally being used by fraud stars to dupe people and siphoning money are mainly concentrated on hotspots. For Axis Bank 80% of mule accounts are concentrated in 700 branches out of 6,2000 branches of the bank. Elaborating on Bengal, he said that district bordering Bangladesh, Bihar and Jharkhand has more mule accounts while there are many hotspots in Rajasthan, MP, Haryana and outskirts of Chennai. “These mule accounts are generally being operated by syndicates and most of them are being bought from young stars with idle accounts. Sameer Shetty earlier added that the bank has adopted series of measures to reduce digital fraud. These includes sending OTP through in house app for financial transactions and not through SMS, face authentication for financial transactions in the line of digi yatra. It has also introduced other features like lock FD which cannot be liquidated for senior citizens. He also claimed that there has been a 4.5 times increase in digital fraud prevention in 2025-26 compared to prebious fiscal through AI led monitoring.