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A 66-year-old Army veteran was swindled of Rs 61 lakh after he connected with a Facebook profile of a woman and was manipulated into making large transfers on pretext of performing bogus online tasks on a shopping website lured by high returns on his investments.
An FIR was registered at the cyber crime police station of Pune City police recently by the Army ex-serviceman, who retired from the Army Medical Corps and lives in Pune. Between January and March this year, the complainant was duped into making 18 transfers totalling Rs 61.33 lakh by online fraudsters.
In the first week of January, the complainant received a friend request from the profile of a woman claiming to be from Patna and having studied at a Patna-based medical college. The complainant accepted the friend request and started chatting. During chats, the ‘woman’ gained trust of the complainant by claiming links to Pune city. As the communication between the two continued, the ‘woman’ asked for the complainant’s phone number, which he gave.
Some time later, the complainant received a message from a woman telling him about a “very good investment opportunity”. The woman sought all the complainant’s personal details and told him she was opening an account in his name. She started asking him to do bogus tasks of liking and sharing certain posts on the website and subsequently asked him to send specific amounts to certain bank accounts. She then sent him bogus screenshots of “high returns he had obtained on his investment”. For example, for Rs 5,695 the complainant was asked to send to a bank account, he was sent a screenshot that showed his profile having received profits of Rs 23,216.
The amounts sought by the fraudsters from him went on increasing. He was asked to make 18 transactions to mule accounts registered in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. By the end of March, the complainant had given a total of Rs 61.33 lakh believing his profits were to the tune of a few crores. When he wanted to withdraw his profits, the woman went incommunicado. After realising he had been cheated, the complainant approached the police and an FIR was registered. A probe has been launched in the case.
Multiple cases of task frauds have been reported in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad over the last three years. In task frauds, the victims initially receive messages offering money for performing tasks such as liking videos online, giving online reviews to businesses such as hotels. They are initially paid small amounts to win their trust.
Later, they are manipulated into doing “higher level” tasks and are asked to pay a fee to receive “prepaid tasks” that will get them higher amounts as returns.
