Mumbai: A 32-year-old woman has fallen prey to scammers and lost over Rs 21 lakh in digital arrest fraud. According to the Navi Mumbai police, the complainant is a resident of Navi Mumbai and works as a software engineer in a private company.
On November 29, she received a phone call from a person who claimed to be calling from a bank and told her that her credit card bill of Rs1.68 lakh was pending.
The complainant told the caller that she did not have a credit card after which the caller told her to raise an online complaint with the Ghatkopar police.
After some time, she received another call from a person who claimed to be a police officer and informed her that her Aadhar card details had been used for money laundering purposes and that she would be arrested.
To prove her innocence, she was told to record her statement over a video call without informing anyone about it, or else her relatives would also be arrested.
Another scammer, posing as an Enforcement Directorate official, spoke to the complainant and induced her to transfer her savings and investment money to a bank account provided by them. They also forced her to take a personal loan and transfer the said amount to a beneficiary bank account.
They had also told the complainant that once their ‘probe’ was complete she would get her money back in seven to eight days.
However, later the scammers started giving evasive replies and refused to give her money back. Having realised that she had been duped, the woman approached the police and got an offence registered last week.
A case has been registered under sections 316 (criminal breach of trust), 318 (cheating), 319 (cheating by personation) 351 (criminal intimidation) of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and section 66D (cheating by personation by using computer resource) of the Information Technology Act.
