E-Paper
Man loses Rs 13 lakh in SIM swap fraud
A 47-year-old man was duped of Rs 13 lakh by a caller who offered to help him update his sim card but swapped the SIM card instead.
A 47-year-old man was duped of Rs 13 lakh by a caller who offered to help him update his sim card but swapped the SIM card instead.
A complaint in the matter was lodged by Deepak Suryavanshi (47), a resident of Chikhali Pradhikaran, according to Pimpri-Chinchwad police.
The transactions started at 11:50am on May 6 when the complainant received a call from an unknown number.
The caller spoke in Hindi and told the complainant that his SIM card was 3G and needed to be updated to 4G or the SIM would stop working, according to the complaint.
After he had the complainant believe that his SIM would stop working, he offered to help him update his SIM. In order to update the SIM, he sent a 19 digit number to his phone and asked him to send it to 12345 through SMS.
Through the process, the man did what the caller asked him to after which he got a text saying his SIM card will be deactivated starting that day, according to the complainant.
However, the caller told him that the number will start functioning again the next day. However, as it did not start, he got suspicious and called up the bank to block his account.
That is when he learned that a personal loan worth Rs 10 lakh was approved on his account. The loan amount as well as over Rs 3 lakh that was in his account was also transferred to multiple accounts.
A total of Rs 13, 42,499 was siphoned from the account of the complainant. The man lodged a complaint only in the month of July, according to the police.
A case under Section 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code along with Section 66(d) of the Information Technology Act was registered at Chikhali police station. Senior police inspector Satish Mane of Chikhali police station is investigating the case.
