Jharkhand man held for duping JNU prof of ₹7.32 lakh
The victim searched for the customer care number of the airline on the internet and ended up dialling a number he found on a portal. The person who received his call introduced himself as an airline executive and tricked the professor into downloading a screen sharing application on his phone, through which the cyber criminal got his credentials and fraudulently transferred ₹7,32,510 to four different accounts
An 18-year-old man of Jamtara in Jharkhand was held from his home town for allegedly defrauding a Vasant Kunj resident of over ₹7.32 lakh by impersonating a customer care executive of an airline, getting the victim to install a third-party screen-sharing app on his phone and siphoning off the funds to four different accounts last October, police said.
The suspect was arrested last week, following which he was linked with 13 more cybercrime complaints, police said. Six mobile phones, six SIM cards and documents related to mule bank accounts he was using to route the gains of the fraud — with ₹1 crore found transferred in the transaction history records — were seized from the accused, identified as Riyaz Ansari, police said.
Deputy commissioner of police (southwest) Rohit Meena said that on October 21 last year, the victim, Udayanath Sahoo, a resident of Vasant Kunj and a professor with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), filed an online complaint on the national cybercrime portal. This was forwarded to the southwest cyber police station, which registered a case and arrested the accused.
“In his complaint, the professor said he wanted to cancel a flight ticket. He searched for the customer care number of the airlines on the internet and ended up dialling a number he found on a portal. The person who received his call introduced himself as an airline executive and tricked the professor into downloading a screen sharing application on his phone, through which the cyber criminal got his credentials and fraudulently transferred ₹7,32,510 to four different accounts,” Meena said.
In the probe, investigators found ₹5 lakh was transferred to an account opened in Kolkata of West Bengal, ₹1.3 lakh to a Mumbai account and the rest to accounts in Ludhiana of Punjab and Varanasi of Uttar Pradesh. However, all four accounts were operated from Jamtara in Jharkhand, police said.
“After establishing the suspect’s location, a team raided possible hideouts of the suspect in Jamtara and arrested him from his native place,” Meena said.
Ansari was brought to Delhi and questioned, through which police ascertained that Riyaz and his brother Mukhtar Ansari — who is absconding committed cyberfraud by posing as customer care executives of multiple companies, by listing out proxy phone numbers. They used online advertisement services to publicise the phone numbers, police said.
“They tricked callers into downloading third-party screen sharing applications on their phones, and feed details of their bank accounts. After obtaining the banking credentials, the fraudsters logged into their bank accounts and transferred money. Analysis of the recovered devices revealed that they had cheated multiple victims using multiple phishing links and other data,” Meena said.
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