A 20-year-old man from Rajasthan’s Alwar, who had allegedly duped a septuagenarian woman of Rs 11 lakh last year in a ‘digital arrest’ fraud, was brought to Kolkata on remand in the case on Wednesday.
Mahesh Kumar, a resident of Banskripalnagar in Alwar, was apprehended from that city on December 24 last year.
The Lake Town police, who are investigating the case of the woman from Dum Dum Park who was duped, did not explain why it took so long to get Kumar in their custody.
The victim, Manju Ganguly, 76, had received a call on her WhatsApp account from Kumar posing as an officer from the Mumbai police’s crime branch.
Picture: Sourced by the Correspondent.
She was told that her Aadhaar card number was used to activate multiple SIM cards through which criminal activities were carried out including illegal trading, gambling and sexual harassment.
The scamster told the elderly woman she was placed on “digital arrest” and would be released on payment of Rs 11 lakh to “settle” the case.
The victim complied and was “released” after two days.
Kumar has been booked under the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS) sections 319 (4) for cheating by impersonation, 316(2) breach of trust, 318(2) cheating and section 1 of which defines the scope of India’s new criminal laws.
In recent times there has been a spike in ‘digital arrest’ frauds, a new form of cyber crime where the victims are threatened by scammers, put on ‘arrest’ and ‘released’ in exchange of money.
A video call is made to the potential target and they are usually told their phone number was used in criminal acts, or they had received packages with suspicious or illegal items. The fraudster then asks for personal and financial information of the victim and asks them to not contact anyone and stay within the confines of their homes.
Earlier, singer Sunidhi Nayak and social media influencer Ankush Bahuguna have been similarly scammed.
“I was shaking, anxious, and kept thinking, ‘What is happening?’ I was literally crying and begging them,” Bahuguna wrote on social media after the 40-hour-long ‘digital arrest’..
On February 28, Yogesh Dua, a kingpin of such scams, was arrested by the cyber crime department of Kolkata Police. The accused is reported to be involved in more than 900 cyber crime cases in India.
A 25-year-old professor from Nainital was duped of Rs 47 lakh and was ‘digitally arrested’ for 18 days, while a businessman from Ahmedabad lost Rs 56 lakh in the online scam recently.
The government of India has started the 14C database, maintained by The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, to prevent digital fraud. The database has the names, mobile numbers, UPI ids, social media handles, and email ids of known scammers.
