There is an ugly logic to recovery fraud. The people most likely to have an old, forgotten holding are also the people least likely to be able to check quickly whether a claim about it is true — and the news that money is waiting is exactly the news someone wants to believe.
So it is worth setting out how these approaches actually work. The scripts are few, and they all share one feature: at some point they need you to do something a real process never requires.
The shape of the approach
It usually opens with specificity, because specificity is what makes it credible. A caller names a company you did hold shares in, or an amount, or a folio number. The natural reaction is that they must be legitimate, because how else would they know?
Often, from you. Details get assembled from public records, from a previous conversation with a different caller, from a form filled in on a website that looked like a checking service. Sometimes the information is simply wrong and stated confidently, and the caller adjusts when you correct them — which means you supplied it.
Specific knowledge is not proof of legitimacy. It is the cheapest part of the operation.
The advance fee
The oldest script and still the most common. The money exists, the claim is progressing, and there is a fee to release it — processing, court, stamp duty, IEPF charges, a government levy. Pay it and the funds follow.
They do not. And once the first payment is made, a second reason usually appears, because the person who paid once has demonstrated they will pay again.
Be clear about the mechanics here: the recovery of your own asset is never gated behind a payment you make to an individual to unlock it. There are genuine costs in some cases — court fees for a succession certificate, stamp duty on an indemnity — but those are paid to courts and authorities in the normal way, against receipts, and they are not the thing standing between you and money someone says is already yours.
The OTP
A one-time password is the whole of a transaction’s security. Anyone asking you to read one out is not verifying you — they are completing something.
The framings vary and are all designed to make it sound procedural: confirming your identity, validating the claim, activating the refund, completing KYC. It does not matter what it is called.
No genuine organisation — not a company, not a registrar, not a bank, not a government authority, not us — will ever ask you to share an OTP. There is no legitimate reason for the request to exist.
Impersonation
Two versions of this, and the second is the one to watch for.
The first impersonates an official body — the IEPF Authority, a regulator, a court — usually with a letterhead and a reference number. Authorities do write to claimants, but they do not cold-call demanding immediate payment, and they do not conduct business over a messaging app.
The second impersonates a real recovery firm — quite possibly one the person has genuinely contacted. The name is right, the branding is close, the contact details are not. This is why it is worth knowing how the firm you are dealing with actually communicates, and going back through a number or address you already had rather than one that arrived in the message.
Harvesting, not stealing
Not every fraudulent approach asks for money. Some only want a complete set of documents — PAN, Aadhaar, cancelled cheque, signature, address proof, demat details — collected under the heading of “starting your claim”.
Nothing then happens, which is what makes it hard to recognise as a loss. The set is the product, and it is worth more assembled than the individual pieces are separately.
A genuine process does ask for identity documents — there is no way to establish that a holding is yours without them. What it does not do is ask for the complete set upfront, before anything has been checked, before you know whether there is anything to claim, and without telling you specifically what each document is for.
What a genuine check never needs
A short list, and it is short deliberately:
- A payment to find out whether you have anything. Searching records is not the expensive part.
- An OTP. Ever, for any reason.
- Your net-banking or demat login credentials. No process needs them.
- A card number. Nothing about claiming your own asset involves one.
- A decision today. Urgency is manufactured because scrutiny is what fails the script. Nothing in this field is time-critical to the hour.
If it has already happened
Report it to the national cybercrime portal and to your bank immediately if money moved — speed genuinely matters for recovery of a transfer. If documents went rather than money, treat the identity set as compromised and watch for accounts opened in your name.
And it is worth saying, because embarrassment stops people reporting: these scripts work on careful people. They are built by professionals, refined over thousands of calls, and aimed at a moment when someone has just been told something they hoped was true.
Our own position is on the record and does not change: we never ask for payment to run a check, and we never ask for a bank, demat or card number out of the blue. If someone contacts you claiming to be us and does either, it isn’t us — and we would like to know about it. Our FAQ says the same thing, and contact page carries the ways we actually get in touch.