Bangalore, May 11: Parcelling a brick is the oldest trick in the mail order retailing lore. Imagine pulling a somewhat similar stunt on the world's largest online retailer and getting away with it and nearly Rs 70 lakh for almost a year.

Now a Bengali engineer in Bangalore is being accused of running such a caper to systematically swindle Amazon out of goods worth Rs 69.91 lakh in about a year.

Deepanwita Ghosh, now in jail custody pending trial, allegedly exploited Amazon's returns policy to fool the company, police said. Since Ghosh is not known to have hired a lawyer yet, her version could not be obtained.

Amazon allows customers to return the goods they have bought within 24 hours of delivery if they find them unsatisfactory or defective. The company has no system of having the packets opened at the delivery point and getting the buyer to certify the article is not a fake.

Amazon's police complaint alleges that Ghosh, a 32-year-old engineering graduate from Bengal, would order expensive gadgets, open the packs, switch the delivered goods with cheap fakes and return them within the prescribed 24 hours.

The experience has prompted Amazon to modify its return policy for mobile phones. It will now accept returns only if the phone's unique International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) code matches the one on the e-tailer's records.

No verification procedure has yet been worked out for gadgets that lack any such identification feature, company officials said.

Police officers claimed that Ghosh had admitted to having sold the original goods through another online platform where she operated with a fake identity.

They said Ghosh had bought 104 articles from Amazon, which allows a whole lot of its goods to be returned, barring personal products and undergarments.

It took almost a year but Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos famously relies on metrics and data, did find out that it was being conned. The company took so long to wise up to the alleged scam because the orders had apparently been placed under different names, using multi-city addresses (the police are probing if there were accomplices).

An internal probe was started after the financial year-end audit smelt a rat in the unusually large number of returns, that too fakes. Although the names and addresses of the buyers were different, the payment details suggested a single source.

Amazon lodged its police complaint on April 18, naming Ghosh as the suspect. Ghosh was arrested from her home in Horamavu, an up-and-coming multi-utility area to the east of the city, soon after. After a spell in police custody, she is now in judicial remand and could face up to seven years in jail if convicted.

A former employee of a services firm whose identity has not been revealed, Ghosh lives with her husband. The police did not give the name or profession of her husband but officers said they would investigate whether he had played any role in the alleged racket.

"Ghosh was prolific with online purchases and had identified a lesser-known portal where she would sell the products, operating under the name Rajarshi96," an officer said, declining to identify the portal. "With every (Amazon) order she returned, Ghosh would make a sale order on this platform."

Sources said Ghosh sometimes placed orders with Amazon after receiving orders from her customers on the other platform.

"She would then get the original products (from Amazon) and dispatch them to her customers (on the other platform)," the officer said.

Ghosh is said to have bought mostly electronic goods such as TV sets, DSLR cameras and mobile phones from Amazon. Officers said they were investigating whether any other e-commerce company had been similarly tricked.

Amazon officials, told that the IMEI rider to the return of cellphones could victimise the buyer if a delivery boy had switched the phone or there had been a mistake at the company's level, said they were not in a position to comment.

Nor could they say whether Amazon was thinking of a system of getting the buyer to certify the product during the delivery.

A company statement said: "As India's most trusted online marketplace, we take incidents of malpractice extremely seriously. We have filed a complaint of fraud against this customer with the police. Local police officials have taken charge and we are extending any and all support or information needed in their investigation."