Maharashtra woman duped of Rs 12 lakh in cyber fraud
Cyber criminals reportedly embezzled more than Rs 12 lakh from a woman in Thane city of Maharashtra, police said on Friday.
According to an official, the 36-year-old victim told the police in her complaint that one of the accused—a man claiming to be a Malaysian national working in the United Kingdom— befriended her on social media in November last year and told the victim that he had sent her a gift from the UK asking her to collect the same.
After a few days, the victim received a call from a woman posing as a customs official in Delhi who informed the complainant that she would have to pay some money to get the gift parcel released from the customs and that her friend had also sent her some foreign currency, the official revealed.
Giving further details, the official said the fake customs official asked her to pay some money to receive the foreign currency and the gift and eventually ended up paying Rs 12.47 lakh in several bank transactions from time to time but never received the gift.
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He said that based on the woman’s complaint filed at the Kapurbawdi police station, a case has been registered under section 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code and provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act against two persons involved in the crime, adding that further investigation is underway and efforts are on to nab the accused.
In a similar incident, a Noida woman was duped of Rs 61,900 by a fraudster while trying to book a doctor’s appointment online,
According to the Delhi police, the victim, identified as Tabassum Qureshi, a resident of Daryaganj in Central Delhi, who works as a television producer registered a complaint saying that she was trying to book an appointment at Dr Sumit Jain’s private clinic online through a number that she got on the internet.
At first, the call didn’t connect but later she received a call from an unknown number who posed as a staff of the clinic. The woman in her complaint said the suspect said that he will book the appointment for her. He asked the woman to pay Rs 5 as a donation to the orphanage kids through a payment link. She tried to make the payment but at first, it was unsuccessful so she used her sister-in-law’s mobile to do the same.
The transaction from her sister-in-law’s mobile also failed but about 10 minutes later she received a message that Rs 51,900 has been deducted from her account. A few minutes later, she received another message stating that Rs 10,000 more has also been deducted from her mother Sardar Qureshi’s account.
