Fake portals crop up as e-challan website crashes

As the Telangana government announced discounts on traffic challans, the Telangana Traffic Police’s e-challan website has crashed. Meanwhile, seeing an opportunity to target gullible people, fake e-challan websites like http://echallanstspolice.in/ have emerged.
When citizens tried to get the discount announced by the authorities recently and pay the challan amount online, the website failed to retrieve the details of the vehicle. Usually, upon entering the vehicle registration number, the website shows details of the pending challans and redirects users to payment gateway. However, as the server has crashed and stopped working for past few days, the users are not able to make the payments.
High search volume is seen as the reason for server issues, and pending challans are not appearing on the portal. The authorities suggest that citizens wait till the last day of Challan payment i.e. January 10, or make the payments at their nearest traffic police station.
It is suspected that a few persons may have made payments on the fake portals.