Mumbai: A 70-year-old Mulund resident has lodged a complaint with the BKC cyber police station after he was defrauded by a friendship club-cum-fake police gang to the tune of ₹57.50 lakh.
Posing as a member of a friendship club, the fraudster contacted the senior citizen and later made a woman talk to him over the phone. The woman induced the elderly person into intimate talking and recorded the conversation.
Later another member of the club called the senior citizen posing as a police officer from Nagpur and extorted ₹57.50 lakh from him by threatening to arrest him in a molestation case. Cyber police officials are investigating the case.
The complainant, a resident of Gawanpada in Mulund (east), on March 15 this year first received an SMS, providing a contact for “local friendship”.
Two days later when the complainant called the number, a person called Vishal picked up the call and introduced himself as an employee from Sapna friendship club. He told the elderly person that he would have to pay a fee of ₹3,000 for joining the club.
The 70-year-old paid the fee and later received a phone call. During the conference call, he was allowed to talk to a woman. The woman then offered the senior citizen to avail the service of “close friendship.”
She started the intimate talk with him and told him that the close friendship also includes full body massage, to which he told her that he was not interested and disconnected the call, stated the police complaint.
A few days later the senior citizen again received a call from Vishal who asked him if he wished to talk to any other woman, to which he said, no. A few days later the complainant received a call from a man identifying himself as one Dharmendra who asked the complainant to pay ₹9,000 to close the membership of the friendship club. The complainant told the person that he doesn’t have money and asked him to close his membership.
According to the police, on March 31, the complainant received a phone call from a person who identified himself as one Vikram Rathod, claiming himself to be a police sub-inspector from Nagpur police. Rathod told the victim that a woman from Sapna Friendship Club has made a molestation complaint against him and submitted evidence as well. Rathod offered to close the case if he paid him ₹97,000
“When the complainant checked the name and picture of Rathod on WhatsApp and Truecaller he saw a police officer’s name and picture and was convinced that the caller was really a police officer,” an official said.
“The complainant then transferred the money to Rathod but he kept on demanding more money from the under one pretext or the other like security deposit, refund processing fee, etc. and eventually extracted a total of ₹57.50 lakh from the elderly citizen,” said a police officer.
Fed up with Rathod’s demand, the complainant finally approached the cyber police station and reported the fraud. The police on Wednesday registered an FIR against the fraudsters based on his complaint.
The investigators are checking the phone call records of the accused people and have also written to the concerned bank seeking details of the accounts in which the elderly person had deposited money.