A 51-year-old woman from Lower Parel, who wanted to sell a household appliance online, lost ₹1.14 lakh to cyber fraud recently, police said on Sunday.
Arpita Kesarkar, an accountant, wanted to get rid of her juicer. She took a photo of the appliance and uploaded it on OLX app, only to get cheated, the police said.
Conman dupes Arpita Kesarkar
According to the NM Joshi Marg police, Kesarkar said in her complaint that around 15 minutes after she uploaded the photo, she received a call from a man named ‘Mukesh Kumar.
Kumar told her that he owned a shop in Mazgaon called Star Electronics, which deals in second-hand items.
Beware of scanning QR codes
Kumar paid Rs100 to Kesarkar through Google Pay to buy the juicer. He then sent her a QR code and asked her to scan it. When Kesarkar scanned that code, Rs6,500 got debited from her bank account.
She told Kumar that money had been deducted, but he said it will be returned.
Victim scanned fraud QR code 7 times
Kumar sent the QR code to her a total of seven times and she kept scanning. As a result Rs1.14 lakh was deducted from her account.
Kesarkar then realised that she had been cheated and approached the police, who registered a case Sections 419 (cheating by personation), 420 (cheating and thereby dishonestly inducing the person deceived to deliver any property to any person) of the Indian Penal Code and Sections 66(c) (cybercrimes relating to computer resources, including dishonestly or fraudulently accessing a computer resource without the permission of its owner) and 66(d) (Whoever by means of any communication device or computer resource cheats by personation)of the IT Act.
Mumbai Cyber Safe:
According to Cyber Crime Cell under Crime Branch of mumbai police , the most common form of online frauds are related to banks, online commerce platforms where fraudsters, posing as bank /platform officials, convince the victim to share OTP, KYC updates and sometimes send the links to be clicked to access bank accounts.
“People should know that no bank or institution is authorised to demand for bank details or PIN numbers. Unfortunately, educated people are falling prey to online frauds and losing lakhs of rupees,” explained DCP Cyber Crime , Balsingh Rajput.
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