Even experts are falling for it: How a Pune chartered accountant lost Rs 1.15 crore in online share trading fraud

Fraudsters allegedly used a WhatsApp group called 'D18 Exploring Profit Methods' to convince the victim that he was accessing high-return share trading training.

Scammers allegedly lured the victim through WhatsApp groups with promises of high returns from IPO investments (File photo for representative use).

By: Express News Service

3 min readPuneJun 15, 2026 11:13 AM IST First published on: Jun 15, 2026 at 11:13 AM IST

Cyber fraudsters allegedly deceived a Pune-based chartered accountant of Rs 1.15 crore in an online trading scam, the police said Monday. The victim, a 48-year-old resident of a luxurious apartment on Sinhagad Road, filed the FIR at the Pune city police’s cyber police station on June 9.

As per the FIR, the victim received an advertisement for ‘D18 Exploring Profit Methods’ on his WhatsApp number on November 15, 2025.

Soon after he clicked on it, he was allegedly added to a WhatsApp group with the same name, ‘D18 Exploring Profit Methods’, having 158 members. The group’s admin, Megnand Sharma, was providing share trading training to the members, as per the FIR.

Later, the victim was allegedly added to another WhatsApp group, ‘7-Special Training Team B’, where he was told that he could become a ‘Qualified Institutional Buyer (QIB)’.

He was told that for regular people, share trading is done at 9 am, but the QIBs do it between 7 pm and 8 pm and get more than 10 per cent profits, the FIR stated.

The victim claimed that he was then asked to apply for ‘ICICI Jerez Prudential Apic’ IPO, assuring huge profits. After the victim invested Rs 60 lakh through online transactions, the cyber fraudsters allegedly told him he had made a profit of Rs 2.5 crore.

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Then, as instructed by the cyber fraudsters, the victim allegedly invested Rs 53 lakh in other IPOs. But on November 29, 2025, he was asked to pay an additional Rs 45 lakh, saying he had been allotted more shares than he had applied for due to “performance or trading” issues, the FIR said.

The victim tried to call the WhatsApp group admin and other members, but did not receive a response. Realising that he had been cheated, he submitted an online complaint to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal by calling the number 1930 on December 31, 2025.

After verification, an FIR was lodged in this case on June 9 at the cyber police station. The police have recorded the chartered accountant’s statement.

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The police said the victim transferred a total of Rs 1,15,32,000 to various fraudulent bank accounts through 13 online transactions between November 11 and December 24 of 2025, hoping to make huge profits from online share trading. But he lost the money to cyber fraudsters.

The police have booked the unidentified cyber criminals under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) sections 318 (4), 319 (2) [cheating], 3 (5) [common intention] and Section 66 (d) [cheating by personation] of the Information Technology (IT) Act. The police are investigating the phone numbers and bank accounts used by the cybercriminals for online fraud.