Pune doctor threatened with arrest in ‘organ trafficking racket’, loses Rs 70 lakh in cyber fraud

In the last week of February, the complainant received a call from a man posing as a bank executive stating that a particular card registered in her name had malfunctioned. The complainant denied having any such card. She was told that there could be criminal activity linked to the card and that she should get in touch with ‘Delhi CID’. A cyber criminal posing as a ‘Delhi CID officer’, who spoke with her in a video call, was wearing a police uniform in a police station like setting. The cyber crook told her that a summons had been issued against her and that transactions of Rs 3 crore were traced on her bank accounts, which had links to organ trafficking and child trafficking rackets. She was told that she will be arrested if she does not cooperate with the probe.

She was told by fraudsters posing as law enforcement officers that she had been kept under surveillance and was manipulated into sharing details about her finances including savings investments. Subsequently, she received a call from a fraudster posing as a prosecutor, who asked her to transfer her savings and investments to a mule account saying they were government accounts and that the funds will be returned soon.

Subsequently, more funds were sought from her for which she was even convinced to mortgage her house. When she called a relative for the process, she was made to realise that she had been a victim of cyber fraud. She subsequently approached the cyber crime police station with a complaint.

Investigtions have revealed that at the heart these scams are multi-layered and geographically distributed multinational syndicates, siphoning money from unsuspecting victims to mule accounts and funnelling it to international cyber masterminds through the cryptocurrency route.

In an advisory issued about such online blackmail cases, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in May last year, “A large number of complaints are being reported on National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) regarding intimidation, blackmail, extortion and ‘digital arrests’ by cyber criminals posing as police authorities, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Narcotics Department, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Enforcement Directorate and other law enforcement agencies.” These frauds were also highlighted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ programme last year.