Navi Mumbai: Ex-BARC engineer, teacher among four duped of Rs 10 lakh in digital payment scams – Times of India

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NAVI MUMBAI: Four residents of Navi Mumbai, including a former BARC engineer and a teacher, lost around Rs 10 lakh in digital payment frauds in the last three days. In three of the cases, the fraudsters, who posed as customer care representatives, asked the victims to download an app to gained remote access to their phones and made the transactions.
In his complaint to Taloja police on Thursday, retired BARC mechanical engineer T Laxman Rao (63) said on Tuesday, he was unable to make a digital payment and ‘coincidentally’ received a call from ‘a customer care representative’ who claimed there was a system error. He connected Rao to his senior R K Sharma, who asked him download an app on his iPhone, reveal his debit card details and carried out two transactions of Rs 2.5 lakh. Then assuring a refund, he sent Rao a link and transferred over Rs 3 lakh in four transactions to a digital wallet in Noida.
In the case filed at NRI Coastal police station, Nerul resident Bhagyashri Deshpande (35) said a ‘customer care agent’ made her download an app on her father’s phone on the pretext of KYC update and made five transactions totalling to Rs 1.5 lakh. New Panvel teacher Aarti Patil (34) and her engineer husband Sachin were duped of Rs 2.3 lakh in the same way by a Noida caller, Karan Srivastav, said Khandeshwar police.
In the fourth case, Seawoods resident V Varghese (70) had found the customer care number online. He told NRI Coastal police that the agent on the pretext of entering a code in the ‘new payment’ option on the UPI app, made him enter multiple numbers, which were actually the amounts to be transferred to his e-wallet, totalling to Rs 65,997.