Techie cheated of Rs 20L by online fraudsters

Online fraudsters cheated a software engineer in the city of Rs 20 lakh under  the pretext of offering him a business deal with high returns.

In his complaint to the cyber crime police, H N Ravi Kumar, residing in JP Nagar 5th phase, said he received a call in September from a man introducing himself as Russell, the head of Nova Pharma company in the United States.

Russell asked Kumar to source some cancer healing seeds available in India in return for a brokerage. Kumar ignored the call.

Two weeks later, Kumar received a mail from Russell, from the email ID of nova-pharma.org. The American man had stated in the mail that Shukla in Maharashtra was his distributors, and asked Kumar to act as his Indian agent
to purchase the seeds from them.

The offer of Rs 50,000 per packet of seeds was too tempting to ignore, Kumar had said in his complaint. Russell further gave him the phone numbers of Girish and Shilpa, with instructions to call them.

The American imposter also told Kumar that a packet of seeds actually costs Rs 2.5 lakh and he needs 10 packets of the seeds.

Once Kumar purchased the seeds and dispatched them to the United States, Russell said he would wire him Rs 30 lakh, including brokerage.

Kumar contacted Girish and Shilpa, who asked him to deposit the money in a Canara Bank account.

To his horror, Kumar found their mobile phones switched off after he had deposited the money.