Victims lost Rs 5.5 crore in over 200 online fraud cases in three years

PK Jaiswar

Amritsar, August 5

With boom in digital payments and online banking sectors in the country and people preferring to transact online with ease, there has been a considerable spike in the cybercrime too.

The testing times of Covid pandemic have only aggravated the situation. Amritsar has been witnessing regular instances of the elderly people and women falling prey to phishing rackets operating from other states.

Recently, a local youth’s family got a call from unknown persons, who claimed to have kidnapped him. They threatened to kill Karamjit Singh, a carpenter. They demanded ransom from his family through a link of a bank account sent to them. During the call, when victim’s family tried to approach him, his phone was found out of reach. Later, they managed to contact him at his work place. But not everyone is lucky. Kanwaljit Kaur of the Gurnam Nagar area lost Rs 1.5 lakh in an online fraud. The money was withdrawn through the UPI payment gateway. The victim came to know about fraud when she went to deposit money in bank. She found that money was debited from her bank account on different dates from January 23 to January 30 this year. The victim works in a private company. A case was registered on July 30.

Similarly, Karandeep Singh of Shaheed Udham Singh Nagar, Arun Mahajan of Ram Nagar, Avi Mehra and Navjot Kaur of Krishna Nagar were duped by cybercriminals earlier this year. Each one lost between 46,000 and Rs 50,000 to fraudsters.

Interestingly, their complaints were merged with a single FIR along with that of Kanwaljit Kaur by the police while noting that investigations revealed that they were duped by same racketeers through the similar modus operandi.

As per information, the Amritsar city police have reported over 30 online fraud cases in the past six months. In the past three years, the figure touched just over 200 with the victim loosing Rs 5.5 crore to online fraudsters.

Vatsala Gupta, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Investigations, said usually it took a lot of time in getting response from banks concerned or online payment companies. Further, the accounts were opened on fake names and addresses, said the DCP. The cybercrime investigations were time consuming exercise, the DCP added.