A 38-year-old man with formal education till Class 3 has been arrested by Uttar Pradesh's Cyber Crime police over Rs 1.68 crore fraud with a businessman on the pretext of trade with a Canadian firm, officials said on Thursday.
The fraudster used Facebook to network with gullible people associated with pharmaceutical productions and represented himself as a middle-man who lured them with good monetary returns, they said.
The accused was arrested from Ballia district by a team of Cyber Crime police station, Noida, which was investigating the case lodged over the complaint of the businessman, who lives in Omaxe NRI City in Greater Noida in February 2021, according to the police.
“Accused Durga Prasad Mishra alias Rajeet Mishra, along with his partners, had posed as a middle-man for a Canada-based pharmaceutical company. Mishra told the complainant that this Canadian firm required 'curvin nuts', an expensive product used for manufacturing of some medicines. If he could procure the product, they would sell it to the Canadian company at a good margin,” Inspector Reeta Yadav, in-charge of Cyber Crime police station here, said.
“However, there was no such Canadian company in reality. The whole story of the product requirement was to lure the complainant, who got trapped in the concocted story and ended up losing Rs 1.68 crore,” Yadav said.
The FIR was lodged under IPC sections 420 (cheating), 467, 468, 471 (all related to forgery of documents) and under provisions of the Information Technology Act and after investigation, the police arrested Mishra who was hiding in Ballia, she added.
During preliminary questioning, Mishra told police that he hails from Ballia and is educated till Class 3 but has been engaged in online frauds for which he used social media platforms like Facebook, the inspector said.
“The accused said he floated a company named DP Enterprises in 2018 in Ankleshwar, Gujarat along with two more partners – Sachin alias Lallan Pandey and Santosh Tiwari. For this company they had opened a current bank account in which the fraudulently earned money was transferred,” she added.
According to police, so far, transactions worth Rs 30 lakh have been found in this account from different sources.
Cyber official S P Singh said further investigation in the case is underway and searches are on to arrest other partners of accused Mishra.
The accused was on Thursday produced in a court here that sent him judicial custody, police said.
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