E-Paper
Chandigarh: 76-year-old woman duped of ₹11-lakh in cyber fraud case
According to the complaint filed by the victim, she received a call on December 3 from a man identifying himself as Avick Sharma from a courier company
A 76-year-old woman, resident of Sector 35-A, fell prey to cyber fraudsters who duped her of ₹11.06 lakh by falsely implicating her in a fabricated narcotics case.
According to the complaint filed by the victim, she received a call on December 3 from a man identifying himself as Avick Sharma from a courier company. He claimed that someone had used her Aadhaar number to send a parcel to Bangkok, Thailand, addressed to a person named Choayo Sanan. The alleged parcel reportedly contained five passports, three credit cards, 4.2 kg of cloth, a laptop, and 140gm of MDMA, a banned narcotic substance.
The caller told her that the parcel had been paid by using an ICICI Bank credit card and that the case had been transferred to the “Cyber Crime Unit, Delhi”. She was then contacted by another person claiming to be Varun Yadav, an IPS officer, who told her that she was under investigation and must not disclose the matter to anyone, not even her family.
The fraudsters sent her a forged letter purportedly from the finance department, instructing her to prematurely withdraw all her fixed deposits and deposit the funds in a single bank account. Following their directions, the victim transferred ₹11.06 lakh via RTGS to a Rama Enterprises account in Bandhan Bank’s Park Street branch, Kolkata.
She was in the process of transferring more funds from another bank when officials at Suryoday Small Finance Bank became suspicious and alerted her that she might be the victim of a digital fraud. A case under sections 318(4), 319(2), 336(3), 338, 340(2), 61(2) of the BNS has been registered at Sector 17 cyber crime police station.
