December 7, 2024
Financial Assets

Nagpur: Fraudsters extort money by creating fake email accounts of Nagpur cyber police


In an “unprecedented” kind of a fraud, a gang extorted money from several persons by creating email addresses similar to those of the Nagpur Cyber Police and getting their accounts freezed by contacting the banks, police said.

Two men have been arrested in the case, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (detection) Nimit Goyal on Wednesday. The fraudsters, who somehow obtained details of at least 176 bank accounts, sent emails to the banks in the name of Nagpur Cyber Police and demanded that these accounts be freezed because of suspicious transactions, he said.

The fraudsters then contacted the account holders, told them that their accounts had been freezed because of ‘anti-national activities’, and demanded money to unfreeze them, the DCP said. This modus operandi was “unprecedented”, Goyal added.

He, however, did not specify the total amount extorted by the fraudsters. The scam came to light when Sweta Kumar Trilochan Panigrahi, an assistant manager with ICICI Bank, received an email from ‘cyberpolice-nagpur@maharashtrapolice.in, asking to freeze certain accounts.

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Panigrahi suspected that it was a fake email address and alerted authorities, following which the Nagpur Cyber Police started a probe and arrested Pradum Anil Singh (26) and Shubham Pitambar Sahu (32) from Mumbai earlier this week.Investigation revealed that the fraudsters targeted 176 accounts across seven banks: SBI, HDFC, Bank of Baroda, AU Small Finance Bank, Federal Bank, Punjab National Bank and IndusInd Bank.

Police are probing how the fraudsters obtained the victims’ banking information and the role of insiders is suspected, Goyal said. A court here has remanded the arrested duo in police custody till August 14.



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