Despite a crackdown by the city police, the ‘courier scam’ continues unabated. A 52-year-old businessman from HSR Layout and 36-year-old private firm employee were duped by fake Mumbai police and courier executives who made away with a total ₹2.2 crore in separate incidents on Wednesday and Thursday.
In the first case, the victim Tarak Shah, received a call from an unknown number claiming to be a representative of an international courier company and informed him that a parcel from Mumbai to Taiwan booked in his name was seized by Mumbai police for smuggling drugs.
The caller even asked him to speak to him on Skype and alerted him that the Mumbai police was investigating the case and asked to cooperate. The next day, Mr. Shah received a call from a person claiming to be from the Mumbai Crime Branch, who demanded details of all his bank accounts to verify his credentials, under the garb of interrogation. Mr. Shah gave him the details of his bank accounts and soon found that the accounts were emptied out and he had lost a total sum of ₹1,98,73,760. Shocked, Mr. Shah realized that the money was withdrawn illegally. He filed a complaint with the police on Thursday.
Earlier, on Wednesday, the accused using the same modus operandi cheated Tapapriyo Maitra, who was also ‘interrogated’ by a ‘police official from the Mumbai Crime Branch’ over skype. He also provided his bank accounts details only to realise that they had emptied out his account of a total sum of ₹23,28,277. The victim, Tapapriyo Maitra, a resident of Tavarekere filed a complaint with the South East Division Police.
It may be recalled that the North Division Cyber Crime Police unearthed a racket and arrested a gang of eight people on December 1 for cheating people in the name of drugs found in the courier parcel in their names. The accused were trapped when some of their accomplices came to withdraw the cash transferred to one of the account in RBL Bank, at a branch in Davanagere. This has become one of the most common modus operandi being deployed by cyber frauds for sometime now, a senior official said.
In order to tackle the growing courier scam effectively, Police Commissioner B. Dayananda set up a special Investigation team headed by DCP (Traffic East Division), to probe cases using this modus operandi effectively.
