Ex-PM’s son duped of Rs 7.8 cr by WhatsApp impersonator posing as him

Former Rajya Sabha MP Naresh Gujral, son of former Prime Minister IK Gujral, was defrauded of Rs 7.8 crore over four days.

The cyber criminals created a WhatsApp account using his profile picture and convinced an employee at his company to transfer funds across four separate transactions.

The scam unravelled when his daughter, alerted to the unusual demands, confirmed with her father that he had issued no such instructions.

The fraud unfolded between June 12 and June 16. An unknown number, carrying Gujral’s display picture, messaged a senior official in the financial division of his textile company with instructions to transfer money via Real-Time Gross Settlement to a specified bank account, citing urgent business reasons. The first transaction alone was for approximately Rs 1.5 crore.

The official, who had been given financial access by Gujral, carried out the transfer without verifying the request through any other channel. Over the following days, three more transactions were requested and executed in the same manner. By the end of the four-day window, the company had transferred a total of Rs 7.8 crore to accounts controlled by the fraudsters.

What makes the case notable is that the company’s bank flagged the unusual activity on its own. Alarmed by the size and frequency of the transactions, the bank contacted the company’s Chief Financial Officer to verify their legitimacy. The CFO, who appears to have also assumed the instructions originated from Gujral, authorised the transfers to proceed regardless. The bank’s intervention, though it did not stop the fraud at the time, would later prove significant in helping investigators trace where the money had gone.

The fraud came undone on June 16, when the employee who had been corresponding with the impersonator grew suspicious and reached out to Diksha, Gujral’s daughter. He told her about the money her father had supposedly been asking him to transfer.

Diksha, alarmed that her father had apparently developed an urgent need for such a large sum, asked him directly about the transactions.

Gujral told her he had never contacted the employee or requested any such transfers. The family immediately suspected fraud and approached the police.

An e-FIR was registered the same day.

A senior police officer confirmed that Rs 4.28 crore of the Rs 7.68 crore defrauded has already been marked as a lien or held in various banks, with efforts continuing to apprehend those responsible. Investigators said the money was first routed into four bank accounts in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, with between Rs 1 crore and Rs 2 crore deposited in each. From there, the funds were dispersed across roughly 30 to 40 accounts and then moved through additional mule accounts in an apparent attempt to obscure the trail.

The case was taken up by the specialised Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations unit of Delhi Police, which tracked the transferred funds and found, unusually, that a significant portion of the money was still sitting in the banking system rather than having been cashed out or converted into cryptocurrency, the typical pattern in such frauds. This allowed Rs 4 crore to be traced and frozen relatively quickly.

Gujral’s case is the latest in a line of high-profile cyber frauds targeting senior Indian industrialists and public figures. In September 2024, SP Oswal, the Padma Bhushan-winning chairman of the Vardhman Group, was duped of Rs 7 crore by fraudsters who impersonated CBI officers, claiming his Aadhaar had been misused in a case linked to fake passports.

The fraudsters went as far as staging a fake virtual courtroom over video call, with one impersonating Chief Justice DY Chandrachud to issue an order against Oswal, before sending him a forged arrest warrant bearing the Enforcement Directorate’s name and seal over WhatsApp, placing the 82-year-old industrialist under what the gang called digital arrest for two days.

Gujral (78), trained as a chartered accountant before building a career in textiles and apparel manufacturing. He served as a Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab between 2007 and 2022 and remains a senior leader of the Shiromani Akali Dal. His father, IK Gujral, served as India’s Prime Minister for eleven months between April 1997 and March 1998.