On September 7, Satish Deshpande received a message that seemed, at the time, perfectly normal.
Deshpande, a director at Pune’s Serum Institute of India, got a WhatsApp text from an unknown number but using the profile photo of his CEO, Adar Poonawala. The message asked him to transfer Rs 1.01 crore to certain bank accounts. It was a lot of money but Deshpande didn’t blink. He asked his finance team to do the needful at once.
