Maharashtra Cyber have traced the accused cyber fraudsters who had duped a Bollywood veteran actress Shabana Azmi in a phishing fraud last month. Police said that the accused were traced to Saharanpur and that the actress was duped using a phishing website, and arrests are yet to be made.
Last month, Azmi took to Twitter to inform that she was duped by a liquor vendor, Living Liquidz, in Powai, who cheated her in an online liquor scam. Soon after she lodged a complaint, she informed the social media that she was not duped by Living Liquidz, but fraudsters who posed as the liquor company.
Acting on the complaint, a team of IIT and IIM students, who were inducted by the Maharashtra Cyber to avail the services of 26 cyber experts, traced the IP address and began the probe, only to realise that Azmi had allegedly placed an order on the legit original website of the liquor store, but was later contacted by the fraudsters, who had replicated the exact website in a phishing fraud, asking the actress to make an online payment after seeking her bank details.
"We suspect that an insider used to redirect the orders received by the liquor store to the phishing fraudsters, who then contacted the victim and minted money off of them. We have traced and identified the accused to Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, and will soon send our teams there to nab them," said Yashasvi Yadav, Inspector General, Maharashtra Cyber.
Incidentally, these fraudsters were traced by the same team of 26 cyber specialists, all graduates from IIT and IIM, who were hired as consultants to assist in investigations of complex offences and had helped trace the cyber attack that led to a major power failure in Mumbai on October 12 last year. In their probe, it was suspected that power outage was a result of a cyber attack made by another country, most likely in an attempt of ransomware.
