Man loses Rs 5,000 in online fraud, goes on to cheat others

A man who lost Rs 5,000 to a fraudster on OLX went on to cheat several people on the pretext of selling them used cars on the same online marketplace.

N Manjunath, 28, a resident of Kaveri Nagar, Tataguni, worked as a flower decorator but the lockdown disrupted his business. He could not find another job. Around this time, he started looking for a used mobile phone on OLX. He liked a phone and contacted the seller, who asked him to pay Rs 5,000 upfront. Manjunath made the payment only to later find that the "seller" had become unreachable.

The fraud hit Manjunath hard, and he decided to cheat others. He set up several OLX accounts under random names such as Nandish Reddy, Babu, Bharath and Shivaji Rao, and started posting pictures of used cars. He posed as the owner of these cars and offered great deals. In reality, he had just taken the pictures of the cars from some showrooms of used automobiles. He also took photocopies of car documents and uploaded them to OLX.

A senior police officer said Manjunath also duped several jobless youths whose documents he had taken by promising them employment opportunities. He later used the documents to buy SIM cards that he mentioned in his OLX accounts.

Police seized Rs 19 lakh worth of valuables from Manjunath, including gold jewellery, a car and a motorbike.