Have multiple PAN cards? This crime carries a penalty; check it out

Has your application for a credit card or loan been rejected? One reason could be because you have two PAN cards against your name. This is because lenders see this as a leading indicator of fraud and hence, don’t want to engage with customers. PANs in 11,46,796 cases were deleted or deactivated where multiple PANs were found allotted to one person, according to a reply filed in response to a question raised in the parliament, in July 2017.

If an individual who has misplaced his existing PAN card and applied for a new one, gets a new PAN number, it is a genuine mistake. But since records will show that you have two PAN numbers, it rings alarm bells for lenders. As per government rules, one cannot apply for a credit card unless one has a PAN card. “We do come across cases of customers who try to create a new identity by using a new PAN number in order to apply for loans or credit cards. They do this in order to get over their past credit history which may be bad,’’ a private sector bank retail lending head said.

Impact of duplicate PAN cards

While applying for a new PAN number the individual may change the name by one initial or the date of birth by one day or one year in order to get a new PAN number and create a new identity. “It is very easy to get a PAN card today. So, we reject cases of dual PAN cards unless the customer comes to us and says it is an error because it is a crime to hold two PAN numbers’’ a bank official said. Vaishali Kasture, country head, Experian India, also agrees that data on duplicate PAN cards and PAN number inconsistencies have been a constant fraud trend.

“Out of all the cases where lenders have declined applications due to fraudulent reasons, we have seen around 8.5% of them being rejected as the applicant data is mapped to multiple PAN cards. This value increases to about 12% for loans amounting over Rs 50,000. The key purpose of the fraudsters in such situations is that they circumvent the existing systemic checks that are done primarily before approving a loan,’’ she said.

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Holding multiple PAN cards usually do not have an impact on the individual’s credit score or history as the latter is connected to the performance of the loan disbursed and does not include any fraudulent information hence is difficult to detect. Thus, for detection of this type of fraud, the traditional checks will not be able to spot multiple PAN ownership cases as they are not equipped to run multiple checks across parameters on applications wherein such cases are detected, Kasture added. For detecting these types of frauds multiple rounds of checks would be essential, which only credit bureaus are able to do with their specialised fraud detection services.

(By  Priya Nair, DNA)