Colaba woman falls for e-commerce portal’s iPhone gift, loses ₹1.47 lakh

A 50-year-old woman from Colaba has lost a little over ₹1

A 50-year-old woman from Colaba has lost a little over ₹1.47 lakh after she decided to take an iPhone-12 (128 GB variant) gifted by an e-commerce site for being one of their valued customers.

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According to the police, Alifya Miqadad Khambati, the wife of a businessman, was approached by a woman who claimed to be working with a leading e-commerce portal. As a valued customer, the woman said, she was being offered a gift.

“The woman asked her to choose between a refrigerator, a television set, and an iPhone-12 [128 GB]. When the complainant expressed her interest in the iPhone, she was told to first shop for ₹5,000 on the website. Since the cash-on-delivery option was not available, and also because a sum of ₹3,000 of it was refundable, Khambati was asked to make the payment via UPI,” a police officer said.

Later, the complainant got a call from another executive who identified himself as Sanjeev Kumar. The man told her she would have to pay the 18% GST - ₹12,000 - to receive the phone.

“He gave her a bank account number but the woman later got a message from the frauds that the transaction had failed. They asked her to transfer another ₹12,010 which she did,” the officer said.

Khambati then got a call from a woman who asked her to make one more transaction and put RA24010 in the remark section to process a refund of her GST money and also told her she would have to enter an OTP which the executive would send her. After the complainant followed the instructions, she lost another ₹24,000.

When the complainant dialled the number to enquire about the refund, she was asked to transfer ₹99,000 through Paytm. The woman then got a call from the frauds who told her they were refunding her ₹1,47,700 in two steps.

“They then sent her a new account number, and via Paytm tried to cheat her further for ₹99,830, ₹50,101, and ₹24,890. As her account did not have adequate balance, the transactions did not go through,” the police officer said.

A case has been registered against unknown persons under section 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 66C (identity theft) and 66D (cheating by personation using computer resources) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.