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Gift voucher scam: FIR lodged against person posing as Chandigarh DGP
District attorney complains that someone contacted him for gift vouchers after posing as the Chandigarh DGP on Whatsapp
Gift voucher scam:
With more people getting fraudulent WhatsApp messages from a person posing as Chandigarh DGP Praveer Ranjan, police lodged an FIR against the unidentified accused on Tuesday.
District attorney Rajinder Singh complained to the police that someone claiming to be DGP Ranjan contacted him via Whatsapp for Amazon gift vouchers. Sources said a female DSP in Chandigarh also received similar messages.
On Singh’s complaint, a case under Sections 419 (cheating by personation), 420 (cheating ), 468 (forgery), 471 (using as genuine a forged document or electronic record) and 511 (attempting to commit offences punishable with imprisonment) of the Indian Penal Code was registered at the Sector 19 police station.
On May 28, the DGP, through Twitter, had urged the public to report to police any demand for gift vouchers by someone using his picture and name on WhatsApp.
Sources said since the fraud bid first came to fore over the past week, the phone number was traced to a labourer in Uttar Pradesh, but has remained switched off, hindering any arrest.
Apart from the DGP, the cyber cell of Chandigarh Police is probing six more such complaints, where fraudsters tried to get gift vouchers by using pictures of notable people on WhatsApp.
Prominent among these cases was the use of pictures of PGIMER director Dr Vivek Lal, a Punjab and Haryana high court judge, principal secretary to the Punjab governor and the head of a Panjab University department. Similar attempts were also made using the pictures of a senior female doctor at GMCH, Sector 32, and a professor at a private university in Mohali.
