Mumbai: The Oshiwara police have registered an FIR against a Mumbai-based woman for allegedly cheating a Non-Resident Indian (NRI) woman out of Rs 41 lakh.
About The Case
The accused, Shenila Sayyid, deceived investors of crores of rupees by convincing many people to invest in her company. She is believed to have fled to Saudi Arabia after the scam. According to the FIR, the complainant, Dumita alias Diya Aluwalia, 27, an author, resides on Veera Desai Road in Andheri West. She is an NRI and a freelance writer based in Austria.
On April 15, 2023, Aluwalia met Sayyid through her friend Fazal Khan in Lokhandwala, Andheri West. Sayyid claimed that she was a doctor and the owner of a company named Joina Creation, a Mumbai-based firm that conducted medical research projects in major hospitals in the city. She further told Aluwalia that if she invested money in her medical project, she would receive Rs 2.40 lakh in four months. Aluwalia agreed to invest, and between April 2023 and January 2025, she invested a total of Rs 41 lakh in multiple transactions.
The payments were made via cheques and online transfers from her Austrian bank account to Sayyid’s Axis Bank and ICICI Bank accounts. Initially, she received Rs 22.56 lakh as returns on her investment, which strengthened her trust in Sayyid. However, later, the payments stopped, and Sayyid became unreachable as her phone was switched off. In the complaint, Aluwalia alleged that Sayyid did not return her principal amount of Rs 41 lakh.
Aluwalia later learned from Fazal and another friend that Sayyid had taken investments from multiple people, all of whom had stopped receiving their promised returns. As investors began questioning each other, they discovered that Sayyid had disappeared from her residence. Eventually, they learned that she had fled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Sayyid initially gained investors’ trust by repaying them in the beginning, but she later vanished, leaving them defrauded. All the cheques she had issued to the investors had bounced. Finally, Aluwalia lodged a complaint, and the case was registered under sections 316(2) (criminal breach of trust) and 318(4) (cheating) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita on March 27.
