Bengaluru: A defence employee lost Rs 5 lakh to fraudsters who offered him a part-time work-from-home job where he had to pay to take up certain tasks and complete them to earn money.
Taking the work on behalf of his wife, he started paying for the tasks. The fraudsters initially started with tasks costing Rs 150 and gave him returns. Later, they increased the task money and cheated him of Rs 5 lakh.
Nilesh (name changed), 37, a resident of Murugeshpalya, told East CEN Crime police in his complaint that he was on March 11 added to a Telegram group named ‘Work from Home, Freelance-37,’ whose admin was named Muskan Aggarwal.
Muskan introduced herself as an HR manager and told Nilesh that he had been selected for a part-time job at an e-commerce company. The fraudster told him that they got his phone number as he had uploaded it for a part-time job. Nilesh had indeed done it for his wife around seven months earlier. He thought it was a genuine job offer and responded to the message by asking what the job was. She said he had to promote products by adding them to his cart on the online platform.
For the first three tasks, they paid Rs 150 into his account. Then, for the next three tasks, they asked him to make payments to a digital payment app (DPA) named Thamil Selvan ID 9843704033@axl. Nilesh paid Rs 1,000 and completed the task. He received Rs 1,650.
For the next three tasks, he was asked to pay Rs 3,000 each to the UPI ID. He paid, and they returned Rs 8,327 as profit to his account. Later, they asked him to pay Rs 7,000 to UPI ID varunshubham70-1@oksbi. After he paid the money, they sent him a link and asked him to register. He obliged and was added to a group related to investment in cryptocurrency. He was assigned a guide, Shahji Jadhav, to help him take the tasks.
He was sent an order to choose Bitcoin (BTC) within 60 seconds. They told him to pay Rs 38,000. When he refused, they told him he would not get his money back. After he paid them, the guide asked him to take two more orders and pay Rs 38,000. When he asked them to return his money, they told him that he had to place two more orders. The next order he placed was for Rs 89,000. After making several such investments, his total payments touched Rs 5 lakh and after that, he refused to pay further.
Nilesh told TOI that he suspected it was a scam after a few tasks, but he was tricked by the messages of the members of the group who were sharing screenshots of their returns. He even messaged in the group saying it was a fraud, but other members texted saying it was not a fraud and they had got good returns.
He decided to approach the police after the fraudsters asked him to pay Rs 1.9 lakh to withdraw his investment, Nilesh added. A senior police officer said a case was registered and an investigation is on.