A phone number belonging to Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Ashok Kumar Lahiri was allegedly hacked on Thursday evening, he claimed in a Facebook post on the same day. He claimed that the hacker used the number to send WhatsApp messages to several people looking for money requests.
Lahiri is expected to take office on Friday.
“Just to inform everyone that my personal phone number has been hacked. If you ask anyone for money, send phone number/google pay or any other financial help message from this number, please do not trust anyone and do any financial transactions. This is totally fake and fraudulent. Be careful and tell others. Thank you,” he wrote in a loose translation from Bengali on Facebook.
In a screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation uploaded by Lahiri, and separate screenshots seen by HT, someone pretending to be Lahiri appears to be urgently asking for money. The person says he needs $56,000 and that the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) service is not working. They also promise to return the money within two hours.
Meanwhile, the recipient repeatedly tries to contact Lahiri via WhatsApp but these calls go unanswered. The sender continues to text instead of speaking during the call, eventually asking “what happened” after sharing the payment number, which does not belong to Lahiri.
The exchange often appears in hacked accounts or impersonation scams. Access is typically gained through OTP theft, phishing links, or SIM swapping attacks linked to the victim’s phone number.
A Department of Telecommunications (DoT) official said the first line of defense for such cases is to report them on a cybercrime portal in conjunction with the Whatsapp web portal. WhatsApp usually takes note and restores the account within six to seven hours.
However, the official added that one thing that remains missing in WhatsApp’s security feature is multi-factor authentication.
“WhatsApp has not made two-factor authentication mandatory, it is leaving it up to the user to activate it. This leaves 60-70 crore users in India on WhatsApp vulnerable. Cases related to digital arrests, sexual blackmail, account takeovers – 85% of them happen on WhatsApp,” the official said, requesting anonymity.
“People in India are not yet digitally literate, so it is the responsibility of such platforms to put user protection in place,” the official added.
When a WhatsApp user enables two-step verification, they have the option to enter their email address. This allows WhatsApp to email them a reset link if they forget their PIN, and also helps protect their accounts, according to the company’s website.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said: “WhatsApp continues to invest in technology, safety tools and resources that equip users to protect themselves from online fraud. We advise people to never share their six-digit PIN with others, not even friends or family, and recommend all users set up two-step verification for added security. We’ve built in security tools like Silence Unknown Callers that block fraudulent calls to increase protection, encourage users to block and report suspicious accounts and run a privacy checkup that allows people to choose the right level of protection for them. “Their account.”
