On the May 6 afternoon, Neha, an IT professional from Hyderabad, received a message on her WhatsApp from a person claiming to be a marketing executive offering an online job offer by listing out tasks for her to do. The ‘job’ would cost her ₹2.34 lakh of her hard-earned money within the next two weeks.
Ms. Neha is among the hundreds of Indians who have fallen prey to this scam. The officials from the Hyderabad Cyber Crimes revealed that they have been getting six to seven complaints a day of a similar nature since February. It is estimated that 15,000 people from across the country were victims of the fraud, with each of them losing ₹5-6 lakh. “However, we have received complaints of people losing ₹80 lakh to even ₹1 crore,” officials said.
Sharing her plight, Ms. Neha said that once the ‘job’ was accepted, the fraudsters would add her phone number to a Telegram group, where a ‘teacher’ would give out tasks to finish and also project a dummy website with a screen showing high amounts of money with a ‘withdraw’ option. “I had taken the help from my friends to pay these fraudsters unaware of the scam. I thought I should complain about this to warn others but there was a queue of victims at the police station who had lost lakhs of rupees to a similar scam,” she said.
