Fedex scam: 2 held for running cyber fraud racket worth Rs 4 cr; linked to over 100 cases

A DAY after the Delhi Police issued a public service announcement, asking the residents to be aware of scamsters posing as police personnel, the South West Delhi Cyber Crime unit arrested two men for allegedly duping a software engineer of Rs 44.45 lakh on the pretext of dispatching a parcel. During investigation, police recovered over Rs 4 crore from different accounts linked to 113 other cyber fraud complaints, said officers.

Sharad Kapur mentioned in his complaint that on February 7, he received a phone call on December 30,2023, and the caller — who claimed to be a Fedex worker in Mumbai — told Kapur that a parcel in his name had been held up by the Mumbai Customs, since it apparently contained four passports and as many credit cards, four kg of clothes and 200 gm of MDMA, which is an illegal psychotropic drug. The caller also said that Kapur’s Aadhar card and cellphone number had been attached to the parcel. When Kapur denied dispatching such a parcel, the caller said he would transfer the call to the Mumbai Police Crime Branch.

The next caller, posing as a policeofficer, then toldkap ur that he would “check whether he had links to other criminal activities”. In his co mp laint,kap ur explained how he heard the “cop” talk to someone in the background, and said: “He... informed the person that he was from the Crime Branch and that he wanted to verify an Aadhar card number ... after a few minutes, the caller who was put on speaker replied that the card belonged to Sharad Kapur, and it was used in money laundering and drug peddling cases. (It also said) there was an account in the same name in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Mumbai,” Kapur stated in the complaint.

After a conversation on length, the scammers asked Kapur to transfer 89% of his bank account’s contents to them, assuring that it would be returned within 15-20 minutes. Kapur alleged that during this time, his cellphone was hacked and a call from his bank — to confirm the transaction — was automatically disconnected, before Kapur could receive it. Kapur never got the money back.

Police arrested Rashid Khan (43) from Shibdaspur in West Bengal. Technical analysis of the phones of the accused revealed Whatsapp chats, photographs and voice notes used to indulge in these crimes. Moreover, the authorities recorded 113 more complaints in the NCRP linked to the accounts they used to commit the crime.