India, Dec. 30 -- India's national cybercrime monitoring agency has issued a new warning to the public over a phone-based scam that is leading to bank fraud and account takeovers. The National Cybercrime Threat Analytics Unit released the advisory under the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre framework after tracking cases where fraudsters used USSD call forwarding codes to divert banking and verification calls.

Authorities said the scam does not rely on internet access or malicious software. Instead, it exploits standard telecom functions and user trust. Cybercrime officials noted that many victims remain unaware of how USSD codes work, which makes the fraud easy to execute and hard to notice in time.

According to the advisory, crim...