Kharghar businessman loses ₹73.51 lakh in friendship club fraud

Chatting with women from a friendship club proved costly for a 60-year-old Kharghar businessman when the ‘dating website’ and a ‘crime branch officer’ conned him

Chatting with women from a friendship club proved costly for a 60-year-old Kharghar businessman when the ‘dating website’ and a ‘crime branch officer’ conned him into paying ₹73.51 lakh over five months.

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The police said this is one of the first such cases with such a high cheating amount.

The complainant, Rajiv S, a former managing director of a milk corporation company, lost his wife last year. Around three months later in September 2018, he received a call from a man, who claimed to be calling from Locanto, an online classifieds website.

The caller told Rajiv he can chat with ‘beautiful women’ online if he registers with Locanto’s dating and friendship club service for ₹3,000. The club promised to share photos of women and their contact numbers. The businessman transferred the amount to a SBI account in Kolkata registered under the name of Shariful Islam.

A day after paying the registration amount, an ‘employee’ named Debashish Mukherjee called Rajiv and said he needed to pay ₹43,600 to get access to the photos and phone numbers of women. The money will be refunded whenever he wished.

Threatening arrest, the man told Rajiv that using such dating sites is a criminal offence and instructed him to keep paying to avoid going to jail. Over the next months, Mukherjee took money from Rajiv in terms of late fee, processing fee, bank charges, service charges and even GST, police said.

The businessman took loans, diluting his policies and borrowed money from his relatives and friends to pay for the service, said the police. Till January this year, he paid ₹73.51 lakh in 39 transactions ranging between ₹30,000 and ₹2 lakh.

“These friendship clubs use numbers of those who are in need of money and pay them a paltry sum to use their phone number to cheat lonely men or women. It is difficult to trace them as they keep changing numbers,” said Pradip Tidar, senior inspector from Kharghar police station.

The police have booked six people including Debashish Mukherjee, an ‘unidentified crime branch officer’ and four women named Jyoti, Ishika Sharma, Sonam and Mahi Chaudhari.