Mumbai: After resigning from his job, 40-year-old Shashi Nirankarnath Kaushal planned a relaxing vacation in Europe with his wife and daughter. He filled out an online visa application and waited for a month for the entry papers. However, a simple query related to the visa process would cost him and his wife ₹2 lakh by cyber frauds, pretending to be visa executives.
Kaushal, a resident of Charkop, then approached the police on Saturday to report the incident.
He told the police that on July 12 he had applied online for three visas to go on a vacation in Europe. As he had made an online application, and it had been almost a month, he decided to track his applications and find out the status of their visas.
On Saturday, since his wife Ruchi Gupta was at home, she logged in to www.vfsglobal.com to check the status. Gupta got the customer care number of VFS Global company and called the number and got the tracking IDs of the visas from a well-known courier company.
Gupta then logged on to the website of the courier company and dialled the number of customer care.
“She called up the number given on the website but the call got disconnected in two rings,” said a police officer from Charkop police station.
Gupta told the police that immediately after the call was disconnected, she received a phone call from the mobile number +91-8240557244.
Upon answering the phone, a caller told Gupta that he was a visa agent and that their visas were not dispatched as the processing fees were not paid.
The caller then told Gupta that he was sending her a link on her mobile number through SMS and that she would have to pay a small amount as processing fees, after which their visas would get dispatched.
“Gupta told us that she did not give any OTP or any other information but paid ₹2 on the link: https://onlinecouriercervi.wixsite.com/my through UPI payments,” said Manohar Shinde, senior police inspector of Charkop police station.
Within four minutes of her sending ₹2, Gupta received four SMSs from her bank that ₹2 lakh had been debited via eight transactions of ₹25,000 each.
Kaushal said that he immediately rushed to his bank and then to the police station to lodge a complaint.
“We have registered an FIR under sections 420 for cheating of the Indian Penal Code and sections 66 (c) and 66 (d) of the Information Technology Act and are tracing the mobile number through which Gupta received the messages,” said Shinde.