Fact Check: A sneak peek into a global factory of phishing websites that even impersonate the Finance Ministry

Online users pretended to be the official website of the ministry of finance and claimed to provide financial aid to Indian citizens amid the current financial crisis.

During the first and the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Centre announced schemes to provide economic relief to people and businesses. The economy right now is still struggling for a number of reasons. Consequently, new relief schemes being announced are a believable idea.

And some people have been taking advantage of that. One such website pretending to be the Finance Ministry of India announced a financial aid of Rs. 30,628 and many believed it to be true.

Of course, the Finance Ministry did not announce any such aid. The Press Information Bureau called this website fraudulent.

But the story doesn’t end there. It has only just begun.

As we peeled off the layers of this website, we came across a global nexus of hundreds of fraudulent websites, extending their tentacles to several countries.

Here, we will dive into the world of those running these websites and figure out their modus operandi.

The aforementioned “Finance Ministry” website appears to be built primarily for mobile devices. And fraudulent websites like these thrive on instant messaging apps like WhatsApp. Case in point, when you share the URL of that website, the preview mentions “finmin.nic.in”, the URL of the Finance Ministry website. And that is meant to trick people. Of course, if you look at the actual URL that’s been shared — indiangotrs.blogspot.com — you’d immediately recognise it does not belong to a government organisation.