COLABA WOMAN FALLS FOR IPHONE GIFT, LOSES ₹1.47L

MUMBAI: A 50-year-old woman from Colaba has lost a little over ₹1.47 lakh after she decided to take an iphone-12 (128 GB variant) gifted by an e-commerce site for being one of their valued customers.

According to police, Alifya Miqadad Khambati was approached by a woman who claimed to be working with a e-commerce portal. As a valued customer, the woman said, she was being offered a gift.

“The woman asked her to choose between a refrigerator, a television set, and an iphone-12 [128 GB]. When the complainant expressed her interest in the iphone, she was told to first shop for ₹5,000 on the website. Since the cash-on-delivery option was not available, and also because a sum of ₹3,000 of it was refundable, Khambati was asked to make the payment via UPI,” a police officer said.

Later, the complainant got a call from another executive who told her that she would have to pay the 18% GST - ₹12,000 - to receive the phone. “He gave her a bank account number but the woman later got a message from the frauds that the transaction had failed. They asked her to transfer another ₹12,010 which she did,” the officer said.

Khambati then got a call from a woman who asked her to make one more transaction and put RA24010 in the remark section to process a refund of her GST money and also told her she would have to enter an OTP which the executive would send her. She lost another ₹24,000.

When the woman dialled the number to enquire about the refund, she was asked to transfer ₹99,000 through Paytm. The woman then got a call from the frauds who told her they were refunding her ₹1,47,700.

“They then sent her a new account number, and via Paytm tried to cheat her further,” the police officer said.