Mumbai: A 34-year-old man has fallen prey to scammers who induced him to invest in stock market trading and duped him to the tune of Rs 52 lakh in a span of two months. According to the police, the complainant is a resident of Nerul and works in a company at BKC.
On January 02, the victim came across a link related to stock trading on the internet. The victim clicked the said link after which he was directed to a WhatsApp group wherein it was being claimed that investors would get lucrative returns on investments in stock trading.
The victim then downloaded the app on his phone on the instructions of scammers. From January 12 till February 14, the victim in 15 online transactions, invested Rs 52.13 lakh and could see his earnings of Rs 65.82 lakh in the app. However, when the victim decided to withdraw his earnings, he was asked by scammers to pay more money.
Since the victim was unable to withdraw his earnings, he realised that he had been duped, He then approached the police and got an offence registered in the matter. The victim has provided details of the mobile numbers used by the scammers, links shared by them and the beneficiary account details to the police.
The police have registered a case under section 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention), 406 (criminal breach of trust), 419 (cheating by personation), 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) of the Indian Penal Code and 66D (cheating by personation by using computer resource) of the Information Technology Act.
The Central Govt had recently issued an alert for citizens warning them about the scammers duping people using fake trading apps. The scammers use fake trading apps to dupe the victim by inducing them to invest in stocks by promising large profits and sharing fake profit screenshots.
In February this year, the Cyber Crime Police of Mumbai had registered at least eleven cases in which scammers had duped citizens collectively to the tune of Rs 4.40 crores.
