Cyber fraudsters duped a 45-year-old Antop Hill resident by first getting a Rs 7 lakh personal loan approved in his name and then asking him to transfer Rs 1 lakh to him on the pretext of an erroneous transaction. The unidentified accused cheated the complainant after trapping him in a Google listing fraud. A case has been registered at Antop Hill police station and a further investigation is underway.
On August 12, the complainant had visited a local branch of a private bank and deposited Rs 10,000 in his account. When he returned home, he did not receive any intimation from the bank about the money being credited in his account, and he looked up the bank's customer care number on an online search engine. He dialled the number shown on the screen, where a man introduced himself as the bank’s customer care agent.
The complainant told him about not receiving any message, to which the man said that the bank's server was down and sent him a link, where he was asked to fill up a form asking for the victim’s personal details, bank account number and the debit card details. "Believing the agent, I filled up the form and shared a One Time Password (OTP) with him, and much to my surprise, Rs 7,00,896 was credited in my account. I immediately received a call from the agent, who said that it was a wrong transaction and asked me to wire the money to a PayTM account," said the complainant in his statement to the police.
The bank agent instructed the complainant to wire Rs 1.05 lakh each day for a week, which would return the money from an inadvertent transaction. The complainant obliged and wired the money on August 12. The next day, he felt something was fishy and approached the bank to enquire about the same, only to find out that the bank had approved and disbursed him a loan of Rs 7,00,896, which was fraudulently availed by the accused in the complainant's name.
The complainant told them about returning Rs 1.05 lakh to the agent, to which the bank authorities asked him to stop making any further payments as he was cheated. He then immediately approached the Antop Hill Police and lodged a complaint, after which the unidentified accused were booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and Information Technology Act.
