Mumbai: A 44-year-old chartered accountant (CA) was cheated to the tune of ₹4 lakh by a fraudster, who posed as an executive working with a finance company.
Dipesh Dharod, 44, a resident of Pantnagar, Ghatkopar East, was working with a finance company at Andheri East as a chief financial officer (CFO) and left the job last month. He received an email from an id- career@ifbiindia.co.in – informing him that the Academy of Banking and Finance was looking for a CFO, and invited him to appear for an interview.
“Interested in the offer, he decided to meet the human resource manager in Byculla to ascertain the prospects of the job,” said senior police inspector Ashok Khot of Byculla police station.
On Monday, when Dharod reached the address in the Byculla area, as given to him in the email, he could not locate the office and called up the phone number given in the email. He got in touch with a person who identified himself as Pravin Mathur.
Mathur told him that he would immediately send their office boy named Rahul to accompany him.
“When Dharod met the office boy, he asked him to call up Mathur to inform him that they met. While speaking with Mathur, the office boy asked him to hand over the phone, saying that he too wanted to speak with Mathur. Pretending to be speaking with him, the office boy then told Dharod that like him, another candidate was waiting on the other side of the road and he will accompany him to the office,” said a police officer.
The office boy then ran and jumped the compound wall and crossed over the railway tracks. “As Dharod reached home in Ghatkopar hours later, he narrated the incident to his family members, and checked his bank account, as the phone had all the banking details, and found out that in four transactions, amounts of ₹25,000, ₹99,650, ₹99,850 and ₹99,860 had been debited from his bank account via net banking,” said an officer.
Dharod immediately informed his bank, requesting to block the net banking, debit, and credit cards, and informed the police. The Byculla police have registered a case for personation and cheating, and also under various sections of the Information Technology Act, 2000.