10 e-fraudsters arrested for Tata Safari ‘gift’ scam
HYDERABAD: As many as 10 online fraudsters were arrested by the Cyberabad Cyber crime police on Monday. The offenders sent gift voucher cards to gullible customers by using e-commerce portals. The arrested include — Tarun Kumar, Prabhakar Kumar Sinha, Kamlesh Dubey, Sourabh Patel, Manchinella Venkatesh, Gurram Rakesh, Elkaturi Prashanth, Suram Rajender Reddy, Lingampally Rajlingu, Yashwanth Thakur.
They hail from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana. Four others are absconding. Most complainants said they got a call from a man named Karthik posing as a representative of Herbal Care Group who asked for their address. The customers then got letters with scratch cards saying they had won a Tata Safari.
However, the customers were then told that due to Covid-19, the vehicle could not be delivered. They were asked to provide bank account details so that the prize money could be deposited. The innocent customers later got a message from AD-SBI BNK like “The car is on hold due to TDS, GST clearance which is Rs 45,150.” The complainants were given two SBI bank account numbers belonging to Ashish Kumar and Jayant Kumar Lenka. After this sum was deposited, they were asked for another Rs 50,000 leading them to realise they had been duped.
Cyberabad Police Commissioner V C Sajjanar said an investigation revealed that the accused Tarun Kumar collected the numbers of customers through e-commerce websites like Herbal Care Group, Shop Clues, Club Factory and Naaptol. The accused Tarun Kumar opened call centres at Rourkela in Odisha and Ranchi in Jharkhand in August 2020. He hired Telugu-speaking telecallers to dupe people of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. So far, police say a Rs 2-crore bank trail has been established. But they estimate that the scam may be over Rs 10 crore.