With the arrest of two persons, police in Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district on Wednesday claimed to have solved an online forgery in which a retired senior scientist of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) lost Rs 14.50 lakh in July.
Bilaspur Superintendent of Police Prashant Agrawal told The Pioneer over phone that the accused, Gautam Kumar (22) and Neeraj Kumar (18) of Nawada district in Bihar, have been taken into custody.
Agrawal said the retired scientist, C.L. Patel, who resides in Uslapur locality in the Sakri police station limits of Bilaspur, complained that he received a call on July 30 from an unknown number.
Patel was told that he had been selected in a lucky draw for a first prize of a SUV worth Rs 14.50 lakh. The caller offered the victim to take the SUV or cash equivalent to its value.
Citing his old age, the victim expressed his intention to take the cash. The caller then asked Patel to deposit a registration fee of Rs 3,500 in an account number so that they could transfer the money through e-banking. Patel did what he was told.
Meanwhile, the unknown caller managed to obtain the user ID and password of the victim’s Internet banking and transferred Rs 14,50,994 to various accounts through online banking.
The victim asked the callers to refund his money. They did not do so. They did not even respond to his calls.
Based on the technical analysis of the mobile numbers used by the cheats, police found their locations in Nawada district. A joint team of Chhattisgarh and Bihar police raided a village in Nawada and arrested the two men.
During the interrogation, they admitted duping the retired scientist. They said they had accomplices but they managed to escape.
Police have seized Rs 5.36 lakh in cash besides two laptops, 21 mobile phones, six ATM cards, eight bank pass books, two memory cards, four Aadhaar cards, three voter ID cards and a bank cheque book from their possession.