[TusharK]

The Delhi Cyber Cell has busted a gang involved in a pan-India scam that is said to have duped over 1,000 people.



According to media reports, two people had designed a fake Ola website. Unsuspecting people looking to purchase an Ola electric scooter would visit the website and share their details. The gang members would then call the victims and ask them to transfer Rs. 499 in the name of 'booking amount' for the e-scooter. They even collected up to Rs 70,000 from customers as registration and transportation charges.

According to the Delhi Police, the gang was operating a call centre from Patna. 16 people believed to be involved in the crime have been arrested. The police have recovered 114 SIM cards, more than 60 mobile phones and 7 laptops from the accused. 25 bank accounts with over Rs 5 crore transactions have been also been traced.

Source: Mint

Link to Team-BHP News

[superbad]

If only the criminals had put their ingenuity & enterprise to better use, I'm sure they would've found gainful employment options in plenty.

[buzzy_boy]

Why's that I have to produce all sorts of personally identifiable data (like Aadhar, and address proof), which will be handled by unsecured systems, to buy one SIM card - while some random dude in Bihar can buy 114 of them?

I mean, what's the point?

[vivekgk]

I'm still surprised by how many otherwise clever and market savvy people fall prey to online scams like this. Maybe, there should be something like a "Blue tick" on the browser bar for verified, genuine websites of big companies to avoid being duped like this.

Scam call centres operating from various locations across Northern India like Patna have been targeting US and UK citizens for almost a decade now, posing as tech support and defrauding mostly old pensioners living on social security. Usually, they fool the victim into believing that they have mistakenly received large amounts of money in their accounts due to the scammer's mistake and have to help them out by buying Google Play store coupons, Apple store cards etc. IMO these *******s should be arrested for ruining our country's image and be charged as traitors. Google or Youtube "why did you redeem it" for more details...

Seems to me that Ola has some indirect blame in this, because of their insistence on an online only sales model (at least initially), which has led many to be easily duped. Face it, if a scammer called someone and said that they were selling Honda Activas or a Suzuki Access at a discount and demanded a deposit or payment online, they would not get as many victims.

[maddy42]

Similar website of Bose was created and the price of their headphones were dropped to 3k and saw a tonne of people get scammed. They used shopify to create a site and its a replica of the original bose site, including the URL.

Our cops really need to up their game to these online scams.

[mayukh42]

Originally Posted by buzzy_boy

SIM card - while some random dude in Bihar can buy 114 of them

Your post might be intentionally sarcastic, but those SIM cards probably belong to several people. 60 mobile phones make it about 2 cards per phone, which is not anything extra-ordinary.

As for procuring them, when Aadhar cards themselves can be faked, how difficult would it be for Step 2?

[baarish84]

Originally Posted by mayukh42

As for procuring them, when Aadhar cards themselves can be faked, how difficult would it be for Step 2?

No need to arrange even fake kyc docs. Our country's institutions handling bulk public documents simply do not have any records management/disposal system in place.

Your and my kyc documents, submitted to banks, electricity boards, cooking gas providers are just dumped somewhere once application/ verification purpose is solved.

I personally have seen thousands of aadhar card photocopies lying unattended in a backside shade of a reputed Bank (these docs were part of crop loan waver
scheme applications from farmers ).

[lapis_lazuli]

Jamtara 2.0!

Jokes apart, I am very curious to understand, what is the conviction rate of these cyber crimes? How does the ancient public prosecutor handle digital evidence? How is the trial concluded (some references most welcome), and whether the law enforcement (read, police) is equally lethargic in due diligence as in usual crime reporting.

[srini1785]

While online scams are nothing new, this takes it to a whole new level. Part of the blame is also on OLA who insist on only online booking with no physical showroom presence.

[livetodrive]

Thanks for reporting this. On other hand I feel Google pay coupons to be another level of scam. They gave me a coupon of 50% discount on Skullcandy wireless headsets which redirected me to Skullcandy website. When I checked in Amazon I found the same model available already with the discounted price.

Sorry for being off topic. But what I felt is scammers are everywhere.