Sirhind man loses Rs 1.9 cr in cyber fraud

A Sirhind resident has been duped of Rs 1.90 crore in an online fraud on the pretext of stock trading.

In his complaint to the cyber cell of the district police, Sumit Kumar Wahi, a resident of Sirhind, stated that on November 28 last year, he had received a friend request from one Preeti Sharma on his Facebook ID, which he accepted. Later, she started chatting with him on WhatsApp and informed him that she was earning a lot of money by trading in the stock market.

She asked him to download the BItop trading app and contact its customer care. She shared two numbers for the purpose. The complainant contacted the customer care and his account was created. He was asked to make investment through the app. He transferred Rs 50,000 and later, a sum of Rs 5,000 was shown as profit in his account. Allured, he deposited more money and got more ‘profit’.

He stated that when he tried to withdraw the money, he got a call from the customer care of the app that if he wanted to do so, 29% tax would be deducted at source. He was asked to invest at least Rs 1 crore to reduce the tax percentage to 4. He kept investing and the amount reached over Rs 1.90 crore. When he tried to withdraw the money, he failed to do so and in turn received a call asking him to deposit tax money first.

The complainant then realised that he had been defrauded. He contacted Preeti Sharma, but she warned him against approaching the police or she would defame him by posting his morphed photos on the social media.

Hartesh Kaushik DSP (H) said the police had registered a case against the unidentified persons and started an investigation into it.