Bengalurean finds ‘love’ online but loses Rs 60 lakh

For a Bengaluru-based software engineer Srinath (name changed), finding love online proved to be an expensive affair.

The girl he met on a dating website not only cheated him of almost Rs 60 lakh, but it also turned out that she was married. Her profile was actually a bait for vulnerable young men like Srinath. 

The accused—Rupali Majumdar (39) and her husband Kushan Majumdar (48)—were arrested from Kolkata by the cybercrime wing of the CID. Rupali’s husband is a Bengali serial actor and a freelancer scriptwriter. 

It all began when Srinath met a woman named Arpita, with user profile ‘Shompa76 on a website, www.mingle2.com. Everything looked ideal—the woman was beautiful and exchanged numbers with him.

Srinath was smitten after chatting with Arpita, who introduced herself as a schoolteacher in Kolkata.

In a few days, Arpita requested Srinath to lend her Rs 30,000 as her father was admitted in the BM Birla Heart Research Centre in Kolkata. Srinath readily transferred the money. But Arpita began emotionally blackmailing the techie and requested him to transfer more money as her father’s health deteriorated further.

Srinath ended up transferring around Rs 59.72 lakh on various occasions during the six months that he "dated" Arpita. However, Srinath began suspecting Arpita when she turned down his requests of meeting her and began avoiding him.

He then approached the cybercrime police and lodged a complaint.

The investigation

The police began investigating the case and reached the banks using the two account details given by ‘Arpita’ to Srinath. They collected the CCTV footage from the banks and traced the couple to a house in Kolkata. 

The couple was immediately nabbed and it turned out that both Rupali Majumdar and her husband Kushan Majumbar were BCom graduates and resorted to illegal ways to earn money so that they could lead a luxurious life. 

According to CID officials, Rupali created the fake account (Shompa76) on the website and used photos of models—downloaded from search engines— as her display picture. She would introduce herself as a teacher or a doctor based in Kolkata, and had trapped several people before Srinath, the investigation revealed. 

Her husband Kushan Majumdar had been jobless for the last three years and used to conspire with his wife to trap their victims. 

He had worked as a salesman for a bank and a freelance scriptwriter besides acting in Bengali serials like Sathpak Bada, Kurukshetra, Pala Badalin, Moachak, etc. One of the two accounts belonged to Kushan, to which Rs 40.72 lakh had been transferred, the police said. 

The police have seized around Rs 44,000 in cash, two mobile phones and a few bank passbooks from the couple.