E-Paper
Two Navi Mumbai residents lose money in internet frauds
A fraudster duped a 35-year-old Seawoods resident of Rs1.55 lakh after he gained access to her phone on the pretext of updating her father’s KYC details. In another
A fraudster duped a 35-year-old Seawoods resident of Rs1.55 lakh after he gained access to her phone on the pretext of updating her father’s KYC details. In another case, a 70-year-old man lost ₹66,000 in a phishing scam when he tried to donate money to a church trust.
In the first case, the complainant from Seawoods, Bhagyashree Deshpande, received a call on Thursday afternoon from a man who identified himself as Rahul Agarwal. The fraudster claimed that he was calling from the headquarters of a payment gateway to inform that her father’s KYC details have expired.
Deshpande followed the fraudster’s instructions to renew the KYC process. The accused then guided her to download a remote control and support application and asked her to pay Re1 as a token amount for the process. When the transfer was successful, the accused spent Rs49,990 using her father’s credit card to make an online purchase.
When Deshpande brought the transaction to the caller’s attention, he said the money will be refunded and asked her to scan a QR code which he had sent. On doing so, she again lost the same amount.
“Realising that the caller was a fraudster, Deshpande rushed to the police station but by then, the accused had spent Rs55,000 more in two different transactions. A cheating case has been registered based on her complain,” said an officer from NRI police station.
In the second incident, another resident, VV Verghese, was trying to donate Rs5,500 to St Mary’s Church trust in Dadar using a popular payment gateway but the payment failed.
On Thursday afternoon, he looked for the payment gateway’s helpline number online and called on it, not knowing that the number was fake. The fraudster posed as an executive of the payment gateway and gave Verghese another number and asked him to transfer Rs4,999 on it.
“On doing so, the complainant received a message stating that the transaction had failed. The ‘executive’ then asked the senior citizen to try transferring Rs5,000 to the number but the transaction failed to get through again. The executive made the complainant repeat the process several times,” the officer said.
The caller then asked Verghese to check his account balance. It was then that the senior citizen had realised that he had lost Rs65,997. When he tried calling on the number, it was switched off. He then filed a complaint with the police.
