City anchor: E-fraud victim turns sleuth,groups other victims to fight together

“When I spoke to the manager of BoB’s Mahim branch,he said my money was gone and tracking down the culprit would be a tedious process. I told him that I’m a doctor and if a patient stops breathing,I have to administer artificial respiration to save his life. I have to make an attempt,” he said.

On April 26,2011,Jalukar’s wife received a call on her cellphone in which a man posing as a Bank of Baroda representative asked her to message him the one-time password for a net banking account that would shortly be sent to her cellphone. Within hours,the amount had been credited to Bank of Baroda accounts in Mulund and Dombivili.

“When I checked my account,I was shocked to find there was only Rs 46 left,” said the 54-year-old Matunga resident,who works at a private pharmaceutical firm. Jalukar registered a complaint at the Mahim police station,but when the officers there allegedly showed little interest in helping to recover his money,he decided to go it alone.

However he hit a dead-end when the two accounts were found to have been created with fake addresses. He then decided to trace the number from which his wife had received the call. “With a letter from the police,I urged Vodafone to give me the Call Detail Records of the number and found that there were several numbers to which the culprit had made calls and messages. So I got into a PCO and began to call all of those numbers one by one,introducing myself as a cop,” he said.

Jalukar came across at least 10 persons across the country who had been cheated,allegedly by the same caller. “I told them to send me their bank documents. When I took the papers to the Bank of Baroda office in BKC,they turned me away,” he alleged.

Jalukar dug deeper and asked to see the form he had submitted to the bank while signing up for the net banking service in 2009 and found that he had not made an error in filling it. “My wife should not have received a call regarding my account in the first place. Just to make sure that I had filled my own cellphone number in the form,I wrote to the bank to give me a copy of the form. After much delay,the bank sent me an email admitting that they had my wife’s number in my form. But how did the caller obtain my wife’s number and how did he know that she would be receiving the password?” he asked.

Jalukar’s order copy is one of the 16 where the investigative officer and the probe method has been questioned. In almost ten cases the Director General of Police has been asked to take training classes for officers in the cyber crime cells. In this order specifically,the Adjudicating Officer has asked the DG “to order an inquiry into absolute lack of interest taken by the investigating officer in this case,and to appoint a senior officer to help other victims of the fraud unearthed by the complainant so diligently”.

Copies of the orders have been sent to the office of the Director General of Police,Maharashtra,and has pulled up the investigating officers for shoddy investigation as none of the cyber investigative tools were used. In another Mumbai specific case,the Adjudicating Officer has also come strongly against an officer in Borivali Police Station for illegally “settling the case” and ordered the DGP to institute an inquiry against the officer.

Meanwhile,Jalukar says he was satisfied with the order and hopes it will elicit a response from the bank. “What is most alarming is the attitude of the bank even after I presented my findings to them. Forget the compensation,they have not even made a single courtesy call even though I’m a customer there for the past 25 years. I will soon close my account at BoB,” he said.

Bank of Baroda authorities were not available for comment.