A 69-year-old retired scientist from BARC who wanted to do some charity ended up losing Rs 2.78 lakh to cyber-frauds, who induced him to download a remote-access application on his phone and siphoned money from his bank account.
According to the police, in April last year, the victim, a resident of Kharghar, had decided to donate some money to charity and was looking to do so through his bank account.
Since the victim was finding some online banking issues, he surfaced on the internet for his bank's toll-free number and came across a number, which turned out to be used by some fraudster, police said.
The victim called on the said number, which was answered by a person who identified himself as Deepak Sharma, claiming to be working as a bank executive.
"Sharma then advised the victim to download a remote-access application on his phone in order to resolve his issue and after gaining access to the victim's phone, the fraudster siphoned off Rs 2.78 lakh in two different transactions," said a police officer.
He added, "When the victim confronted Sharma about the money that had got debited from his account, the latter told him that the money would get refunded back in his account in 24 hours."
The victim waited for the money to get credited back to his account and when that did not happen, he realised that he had been duped. The victim then went abroad and could only lodge a complaint on Wednesday, after returning back, police said.
The police have registered a case under section 420 (Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) of the Indian Penal Code and relevant section of the Information Technology Act.
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