Genuine sender or spoofed?
What the sender line can tell you, and the important thing it cannot.
Last reviewed 28 August 2026
How real ones look
Registered businesses in India send from a short alphanumeric header, not a phone number. It looks like VM-HDFCBK or AD-SBIINB: two letters, a dash, then a six-character code.
The two letters at the front are the operator that delivered the message, and they change. The part after the dash identifies the sender, which is the part worth reading.
The important thing a header cannot tell you
Sender headers can be spoofed. A scam can arrive showing a genuine bank header, and it will then sit in the same conversation thread as the real messages from that bank, which makes it look far more convincing than a message from an unknown number ever could.
So a genuine header is evidence, not proof. It should raise your confidence a little and settle nothing. Judge the message on what it asks you to do: no genuine sender, however real their header, will ask you for an OTP or send you to a login page.
Headers we hold
Check any sender against these on the sender checker.
- State Bank of India
SBIINB, SBIBNK, SBIPSG, ATMSBI, SBICRD - HDFC Bank
HDFCBK, HDFCBN, HDFCSL - ICICI Bank
ICICIB, ICICIT, ICICIP - Axis Bank
AXISBK, AXISBN - Kotak Mahindra Bank
KOTAKB, KMBLNK - Punjab National Bank
PNBSMS, PNBBNK - Bank of Baroda
BOBTXN, BOBSMS - Canara Bank
CANBNK - Union Bank of India
UNIONB - IDFC FIRST Bank
IDFCFB - YES Bank
YESBNK - IndusInd Bank
INDUSB - Federal Bank
FEDBNK - IDBI Bank
IDBIBK - Paytm
PAYTMB, PYTMPB - PhonePe
PHONPE - Amazon Pay
AMAZON, AMZNIN - Reliance Jio
JIOTBH, RJIOTB - Airtel
AIRTEL, AIRINF - Vodafone Idea
VODAFN, VFCARE, VIDEAI - BSNL
BSNLIN, BSNLOF - IRCTC
IRCTCI, IRCTDR - UIDAI (Aadhaar)
UIDAI, AADHAR - EPFO
EPFOHO - Income Tax Department
ITDEPT, ITDCPC
The test that always works
Ignore the sender entirely. Close the message, open the company’s own app, and look. Anything genuinely wrong with your account will be there. Nothing in a message can fake that, which is what makes it the only check worth relying on.