Calling Zomato customer care centre? DO NOT! You may end up losing all your money

Ever since food ordering platforms like Zomato and Swiggy have entered our lives, things have become a lot easier. We have a solution for all our food-related platforms. But, even this has not been spared by scammers. If you ever ordered food from Zomato and are planning to call its customer care centre to register a complain, you need to stop right now. This could be a bad idea and you may end up losing all the money in your bank account. Actually, the food delivery app does not have a call-in facility and addresses all the issues through chats.

This came to light after several customers reported fake customer care number of the app after which Zomato filed a police complaint last month. The food aggregator did not confirm the development to Zee Business Online but said, "Zomato constantly reminds users that chat and email are our first channels of care. We never ever request users to share their personal/bank account details. For all their queries, they can reach out to us via email (help@zomato.com) or the chat support on the app. We are also sharing similar messages with our all users via our different channels of communication and are soon going to display it on our app as well."

This is what a Bengaluru woman attempted, only to lose all her money. The woman who wasn't happy with her order and wanted a refund, reportedly searched Zomato's customer care number on Google. She was reassured by the customer care executive that she will get a full refund within 24 hours. However, as it turned out, she was robbed off her hard-earned money within next few minutes and her bank account had zero balance.

The woman had called the number 9134425406. The person on the other end told her that the refund amount could be transferred immediately via Google Pay and she would have to download a mobile application called 'Any Desk’. She followed the directions given to her and lost all her savings - Rs 17,286. 

A similar case was reported from Chennai where a man came across a fake customer care number on the internet and was asked to share his unified payments interface (UPI) pin, password and bank details to initiate a refund for his order. The man shared an incorrect pin and soon, received two SMSs from his bank stating that two transaction requests for amounts of Rs 5,000 and Rs 10 had failed due to incorrect pin.

A case was registered under section 420 (cheating) of IPC and section 66C (identity theft), 66D (impersonation to cheat by using electronic and computer device) of the IT Act.