Cyber crooks dupe woman of `1.65 lakh on wedding portal

With a series of frauds being reported from the region, cyber crime remains a cause for concern for the Thane (rural) police. In a latest case, cyber crooks targeted a 32-year-old woman (name withheld to protect her identity) on a popular matrimonial website.

In her complaint, the aspiring bride said she had uploaded her profile, along with her contact numbers, on the web-portal, last month. A few days later, she got a text message from a person, who identified himself as Rahul Mark, an England resident.

Claiming to be a marine engineer, Mark proposed to the woman for marriage and expressed his desire to send her expensive gifts. Soon, she received a call from a woman claiming to be an employee of a courier firm, informing her of the arrival of an expensive laptop wrapped in a gift paper with £40,000 in cash. She was asked to pay charges to obtain the gifts.

The unsuspecting woman paid `1.65 lakh, through multiple transfers in different bank accounts. Later, when more money was demanded, she got suspicious and registered a complaint at the local police station. A case under Section 420 of the IPC and Sec 66 (c) of the IT Act, 2000, was registered against the online fraudsters on Wednesday. While the case is under probe, police have made an appeal to people to be extremely cautiously before entering into any type of financial transaction with strangers and refrain from accepting online friend requests blindly.