Scammed Out of Rs 80,000: Woman Pays Just Rs 5 for Courier Delivery

All kinds of scams are rampant in India. Scammers have become more and more sophisticated, but they have also started using new techniques to gain the trust of potential victims.

While we’ve seen scams like job scams on Telegram and WhatsApp, and even a fake army officer scam where fraudsters posing as defense personnel contact you on brokerage and second-hand marketplaces, the courier delivery scam has mostly flown under the radar. where – scammers masquerading as distribution agents send you malicious links. This is exactly what happened to a woman living in Mohali, Punjab.

According to a TOI report, a woman named Shefali Chaudhary lost Rs 80,000 after she was told to send Rs 5 to receive a package. The scammer told the victim that he would have to send Rs 5 as ‘handling charges’ to receive the package and even confirmed his address on the phone itself. The scammer ended up creating a payment link and asked the woman to pay 5 rubles for it. However, when he went to do so, Rs 40,000 was deducted from his bank account twice, for a total of Rs 80,000.

We’ve seen another version of this scam in the past, where the scammers ask for an OTP to confirm or cancel a “courier” you never ordered, and in doing so, wipe out your hard-earned money.

How to stay safe:

To protect yourself from such scams, always remember that no official courier delivery will ask for “handling charges” before delivery, and even if there are, they are preferably paid before the courier is dispatched. So always check and check with friends and family to see if anyone has a pending order.

Also, if you get any foreign links on your device, never click on them, as they can drain your account and even add malware to it, causing long-term harm.

Also, don’t give sensitive information like Aadhar or driving licenses to random vendors as it can also cause problems. And a general rule of thumb is to remember that if something is too good to be true, it usually is.