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Murder, fraud and theft: Do premium phones do more harm than good?
From a murder in Chinhat to delivery executives stealing 13 phones worth ₹12 lakh, premium smartphones linked to multiple crimes in city
Premium smartphones ordered from e-commerce portals had been linked to multiple crimes—from minor offences to even a murder—that were reported in the city over the past few months.
While in at least one such case a delivery executive ended up being the victim, in others it was the executives who perpetrated or were involved in the crime.
Only in September, Bharat Kumar Verma, a 32-year-old delivery executive, was allegedly strangled to death by two-three men who had ordered two smartphones worth ₹1.5 lakh. Kumar, who hailed from the Chinhat area of Lucknow, was allegedly killed when he asked the accused to pay the amount for the phones. His body was stuffed in a bag and disposed of in a canal.
Even though two accused in the case were arrested and one surrendered before a court, Kumar’s body could not be traced till date.
In another incident, two delivery executives scammed a company they were attached to and stole 13 phones valued at over ₹12 lakh. The case came to light when an official of the company, Green Tech Logistics and Mobility, filed a case at the Chinhat police station last Friday.
All the stolen phones were brand new and of a particular brand. They were either returned by customers or orders for them were cancelled after purchase, the police added. After taking back the delivery from the customers, the duo used to remove the phones from their boxes and replace them with soaps or tiles before depositing the box at the company’s warehouse on Satrik Road in Chinhat.
An FIR was registered against the two executives—identified as Erar of Telibagh and Momin of Cantt—at the Chinhat police station on November 29 under BNS sections 316(2) (criminal breach of trust) and 318 (cheating) on the complaint of Shobit Dixit, the operations head of the company.
Chinhat station house officer Bharat Pathak said the matter was being investigated.
“The accused committed fraud while returning products to the company. These products were either returned by customers or orders for them were cancelled. They used to take out phones from their boxes and replace them with soaps or tiles before depositing sealed boxes at the company’s office,” read the FIR copy.
Similarly, four premium phones of a particular brand, with a combined worth of ₹2.5 lakh, went missing from the Amazon warehouse located in the Banthra area of Lucknow in 2023. The issue came to light only when an FIR was registered on court orders on November 25 this year.
Mohit Gaur, an authorised representative of Amazon Seller Service, told the police that the missing phones came to the staff’s notice during the transfer of goods from the warehouse in November last year. An internal investigation revealed that four phones kept in a parcel were stolen. Their combined price was around ₹2.50 lakh.
According to Brijesh Yadav, the station house officer of the cybercrime police station in the state capital, multiple such cases of people of fraud related to premium phones had come to the fore and cases were registered as well. “In some cases, it was the employees who hacked their company’s software to commit the fraud,” he added.
