Posing as army officers, fraudsters dupe physiotherapist

The Mumbai police have appealed to citizens through various awareness campaigns and social media platforms to not fall prey to such callers who ask for money through online apps

Mumbai: Two fraudsters duped a 24-year-old physiotherapist from Vile Parle to the tune of ₹1 lakh by employing a novel modus operandi. Posing as military officers, the fraudsters informed him that they want 100 physiotherapy sessions for 15 military officers at the city airport and extracted the amount from him under various pretexts.

Shrikant introduced himself as an army officer and told Verma that he needed a physiotherapist and called him to the military camp in Kalina at 3 pm for the first session.

According to the police, complainant Rajkumar Verma is a resident of Ram Mandir Road in Vile Parle East. After completing his studies, the son of a businessman started his physiotherapy practice in Malviya Nagar in Vile Parle East. Verma had enrolled with Portia, an online portal through which he used to get patients.

Verma told the Vile Parle police that on Saturday he received a call from the representative of the portal, identified as Jagdish Bandi, who connected him to one Shrikant Verma through a conference call.

Shrikant introduced himself as an army officer and told Verma that he needed a physiotherapist and called him to the military camp in Kalina at 3 pm for the first session. As decided, Verma reached the Airport gate number 8, at Military Camp and called Bandi to get him connected to Shrikant.

When Shrikant answered his call, he asked Verma to send him his photo and Aadhaar card details on WhatsApp so that he could get access through the airport gate. Verma then asked for Shrikant’s number from Bandi and then directly sent his Aadhaar card details and photo to him.

Shrikant then called Verma and told him that his identification card will be made for airport access and asked him how much would he charge for 100 physiotherapy sessions for 15 of his colleagues.

“Shrikant then told me that his superior officer would call me back and discuss the payment before I could enter the airport,” said Verma.

After ten minutes Verma received a call from Randeep Singh who introduced himself as Shrikant’s superior but did not reveal his designation. Singh informed Verma that he would be receiving payment through an army credit card and the payment would be routed through Jammu.

He then asked Verma to open the Google Pay app and send them the amount he would charge for the physiotherapy sessions. He then gave Verma four digits saying that he would be getting payments through the card ending with this number.

“For verification purposes, he would have to send ₹24,000 so that the army could find out whether the payment was going to a genuine physiotherapist,” said a police officer from Vile Parle police station.

When Verma sent the payment, he received a message that it took more than two minutes due to which the payment could not be processed. “Singh assured Verma that the army would refund the money, but this time he would have to pay ₹76,000. Verma paid the additional amount as he thought it would get refunded. However after waiting for more than an hour when Verma did not get any calls from Singh or Shrikant to enter the airport gate and all his calls were going unanswered, he realised that he was cheated,” said the officer.

Verma then approached the police and reported the incident.

The Mumbai police have appealed to citizens through various awareness campaigns and social media platforms to not fall prey to such callers who ask for money through online apps, by luring the victims into securing jobs etc. The Cyber Cell of the Mumbai police has been since May 22 putting up posters at prominent places across the city to create awareness among the people so that they do not fall prey to cyber fraudsters and money lending apps.