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Bengaluru: The police said that a software engineer, Kumarasamy Sivakkumar, has lost Rs 2.24 crore to the cyber fraudsters who swindled him by posing as Delhi Customs and Narcotics Control Bureau officials. The man was 52-year-old.
According to a report, the scammers told the engineer that an air parcel addressed to him had been detained at the Delhi Airport. The incident comes shortly after a 29-year-old Bengaluru woman lawyer lost Rs 14.57 lakh after she stripped in front of fraudsters on a Skype video conference.
Police said the fraudsters called the software engineer between March 18 and March 27 and said they were from the Customs Department and that a parcel in his name travelling from Delhi to Malaysia had been stopped at the Delhi airport as it contained 16 passports, 58 bank ATM cards and 140 grams of Ecstasy drug tablets (also known as MDMA, a banned narcotic).
This call was then transferred to the ‘Narcotics Control Bureau’ where the ‘officer’ forced him to download Skype, and come online. They asked him to pay money if he wanted to get rid of the case. Sivakkumar told police that he paid Rs 2.24 crore in eight installments through Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and Immediate Payment Service (IMPS).
According to police sources, since the beginning of the month, about 25 people have fallen prey to fraudsters and have been duped of more than Rs 4 crore in the limits of North East Cyber Crime Police Station alone. They said that in most of the cases, the same type of fraud was committed.
