Retiree loses life savings to Amazon spoof website scam

Mumbai A 59-year-old retiree lost his entire lifesavings in less than 20 days to an elaborate scam perpetrated in the name of online retail giant Amazon

Mumbai A 59-year-old retiree lost his entire lifesavings in less than 20 days to an elaborate scam perpetrated in the name of online retail giant Amazon. The West Region Cyber police have initiated investigations into the matter.

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According to police officials, the complainant, Sharad Agrawal, stays with his family in Chandivali and retired from a private firm last year. The police said that on November 4 this year, Agrawal received a text message, offering part time jobs. Agrawal called the number from where he had received the message and spoke to a woman who identified herself as ‘Alice from Flipkart.’

The supposed Alice told Agrawal that he could gain easy money by leaving positive reviews on Flipkart. Agrawal did as he was told and was paid ₹300 the same day. Convinced that he was dealing with a genuine party, Agrawal expressed willingness to work further with ‘Alice’ and she gave him a number to contact.

“I contacted the number and the person at the other end claimed to be Jenny, ‘finance manager’ with Amazon. She added me to a WhatsApp group and sent me a link – amazonget.top - which led to an online shopping website that looked like the genuine Amazon homepage. Jenny told me that for every item that I bought on the website, I would be repaid with 20% more than what I had spent,” Agrawal has said in his statement to the police.

Agrawal made small purchases in the beginning, and was repaid with a 20% profit twice, which further cemented his trust in ‘Jenny’. He then started making larger purchases, with the prices going from thousands to lakhs.

After one transaction, the person posing as Jenny told Agrawal that he purchased the same product twice, which had led to a glitch in their system. In order to ‘overcome this issue’, Jenny said that he would have to make some more purchases.

“Till November 17, Agrawal made purchases worth a total of ₹15.41 lakh through the spoof website. Not only was no product ever delivered to him, the accused also kept giving excuses every time he asked to be reimbursed. Ultimately, Agrawal had no more money left and he finally realised that he was being cheated,” said an officer with the West Region Cyber police station.

Subsequently, on November 18, Agrawal approached the police and a complaint of cheating under the Indian Penal Code, along with relevant sections of the Information Technology Act, was registered. The police are now obtaining the domain information and Internet Protocol (IP) address of the spoof website as well as details of the mobile numbers used by the accused.