Pune: An engineer (34) of a private company lost Rs1.81 crore to cybercrooks in an online share-trading fraud between August and October last year. The victim not only spent his entire savings but also took money from his wife, brother and father to invest in the bogus share trade. A case was registered with the Pune Cyber police after he filed an online complaint application.An officer from the Pune Cyber police said a criminal contacted the engineer through a mobile messaging app in June last year and gave him information about investments as well as profits in the stock market. The victim was then added to a group of investors, where he was assured of a 700% profit on investments. “Some criminals then guided him about share-trading. They told him to purchase stocks in the upper circuit and invest through block trading,” the officer said.He said the engineer then started transferring money to the bank account numbers provided to him. He transferred Rs1.81 crore to these accounts between August and October last year. The victim transferred Rs1.1 crore from his bank account, Rs33.5 lakh from his brother’s, Rs22.6 lakh from his wife’s account and Rs15 lakh from his father’s. “He could see in the app that he had earned a profit of Rs14.53 crore on investments. When he tried to withdraw the money, he was told to pay Rs3 crore as tax on his profit,” the officer said.He said when the engineer told the criminals to deduct the tax amount from his profit and return the remaining amount, the latter stopped responding to him. “The investigations so far revealed that the victim’s money was transferred to bank accounts in Gurgaon in Haryana, Bokaro in Jharkhand, Howrah in West Bengal and Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh. We have sought the details of transactions from the banks concerned,” he said.
