Pune: A retired govt officer’s two trysts with cyberfrauds within a span of a month ended on two different notes — bitter and some solace.A group of cybercooks turned him into a pauper in a digital arrest fraud in Oct. A month on, another criminal with the same objective guided him to the Cyber police station in Shivajinagar to register a case against the previous suspects after learning that he was already penniless.
The retired officer’s first tryst with cyberfrauds was in Oct. He lost Rs1.07 crore to them after being threatened with arrest in a bogus money laundering case. He exhausted all his savings and withdrew all his fixed deposits to pay the money to the first set of cyberfraudsters, said senior inspector Swapnali Shinde of the Pune cyber police.In Nov, another cyberfraudster called him under the guise of the Mumbai police. This bogus officer directed him to the Pune Cyber police station after learning that someone else had cheated him earlier.“The retired officer walked into the police station with his cellphone while speaking on a video call. He told one of our constables to speak with the fraudster, after the latter spoke to him. The fraudster on the other side of the phone immediately switched from the video call to the voice call mode. He told us that the retired person was cheated by another person and not him, and requested us to register a case,” Shinde said.“When we spoke with the retired state govt officer, he told us that the person who directed him to the police station claimed over the phone to be a police officer of the Mumbai crime branch. He was told that there was an arrest warrant against him in a money laundering case. When the bogus policeman realised that the retired officer had nothing to pay him, he directed the latter to the police station,” senior inspector Shinde said.“After completing the call with the fraudster in the police station, the victim narrated his plight to us. He told us that he informed the fraudster who called him in Nov about what he went through and how he exhausted all his money on another bogus ‘police officer(s)’, who also wanted to arrest him in a money laundering case. We immediately registered a case against the fraudsters, who cheated him of Rs1.07 crore by threatening to arrest him,” she said.The first set of fraudsters, according to the police, made a call to the retired state govt officer and told him that his bank account and Aadhaar card were misused by people involved in money laundering and financial fraud cases. The fraudsters promised to settle his case against the payment of some money. The victim then transferred the money to four different bank accounts, the police said.
