Man cheated twice by fake CISF officer after he posted his apartment for rent on MagicBricks
While fraudsters are already known to be making use of platforms like Paytm, Olx, Quikr, in a strange case, a flat owner got scammed when he posted an ad for his rental flat on MagicBricks – a popular real estate site.
Victim – Rajeev Sharma, a resident of Jaipur, fell for a scam when a fraudster masquerading as an army officer contacted him through MagicBricks and cheated him of almost a month’s deposit.
Return Byte Tech contacted the victim to find out how the strange series of events unfolded. Rajeev Sharma, who lives in Jaipur, Rajasthan, said, “I wanted to rent out my 3BHK flat, but I was fed up with real estate agents and decided to list my flat on MagicBricks.”
There were numerous inquiries, but one offer stood out from the rest. A person named Deepak Pawar, who called himself a CISF officer, readily accepted the requested monthly rent of Rs 25,000 without any negotiation.
“He used two numbers – +91 7008346845 and +91 9124367583 to contact me,” the victim said.
Later, the bogus CISF official asked for Rajeev Sharma’s bank details to enable the transfer of three months’ advance rent, totaling Rs 75,000.
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In an attempt to validate his claims, the fraudster provided the victim with multiple Aadhar cards, some of which were supposedly of high-ranking individuals, along with other defensive IDs, including canteen smart cards.
Convinced of the authenticity of the so-called CISF officer, Rajeev Sharma shared his bank details. Now, the mistake made by the victim in this case was that instead of handling the transaction himself, he passed on the phone number of his teenage daughter, who is in class 10, to coordinate with a ‘fake CISF officer’, as Sharma himself put it. busy with his work.
The scammer contacted the daughter, as the victim said, and manipulated her into initiating the transfer of funds instead of receiving them.
The school-going daughter, who was not familiar with the operation of the ICICI mobile banking app, entered the fraudster’s bank details into the app and sent Rs 75,000.
But luckily, the ICICI account belonging to her elder sister, who is pursuing MBBS, had a balance of only Rs 8,500. After the transaction failed, the fraudsters tricked the girl and instructed her to send Rs 8,500 to her HDFC account.
By the time I realized what had happened, it was already too late. 8500 rupees had been deducted from the victim’s account, but Rajeev and his elder daughter decided to confront the scammer, only to fall prey to his manipulation once again.
The scammer claimed that due to alleged “restrictions in his merchant account”, he would need to send more funds to make his account “eligible to transfer the promised deposit of Rs 75,000”. Once again falling prey, they deposited another Rs 8,500, resulting in a total transfer of Rs 17,000 to the scammer.
When the family found out about the scam, they did not reach out to the scammers. They lodged a complaint with the Cyber Crime portal and are now awaiting investigation.
Similar cases have been reported in the past when people selling goods online are contacted by fake army officers who ask to send payments without meeting them in person. But instead of sending money they generate UPI requests.
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