Thane woman loses ₹15.38 lakh in online prepaid task fraud; police register case | Representative Image
Mumbai: A 42-year-old woman has fallen prey to scammers on online prepaid task fraud and ended up losing Rs 15.38 lakh in 22 online transactions.
According to the police, the victim is a resident of Thane and works as a quality analyser in a private company. Recently, the victim had received a Telegram message regarding a work from home opportunity.
When the victim inquired about the said job she was informed that she would be given online tasks and on completion of those tasks, she would be paid well. Since the victim was in need of money, she agreed to do the job.
After that the scammer sent her a list of hotels and gave her a task to give a good review of the said hotels. On completion of the said task, the scammers paid Rs876 to the victim in her bank account.
Later the scammers told the victim that if she want to earn more money she would have to open a premium account and pay a deposit of Rs 10,000 for that. The victim agreed and paid the said amount to the scammer, online.
Then onwards, the scammers kept giving various tasks to the victim on different occasions and also paid her money regularly on the completion of those tasks. Once he gained trust of the victim he induced her to pay bigger amount to make more profit.
The victim ended up paying Rs 15.38 lakh to the scammers in 22 online transactions. When the accused stopped responding to calls and messages of the victim and went incommunicado, the victim realised she had been duped. She then approached the police and got an offence registered in the matter last week.
A case has been registered by the police under section 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 66C (identity theft), 66D (cheating by personation by using computer resource) of the Information Technology Act.
