Former postal chief loses Rs 22 lakhs to digital arrest in Telangana
HYDERABAD: A 77-year-old retired chief postmaster general, a resident of AC Guards, was cheated of Rs 22 lakh in a digital arrest fraud, police said.
The victim received a call on December 7 from a woman identifying herself as Arrohi Jain from the Ministry of Communications, who claimed an FIR had been registered against him in connection with a SIM card allegedly issued in Delhi and used for fraudulent activities. At the time, the victim was in Trivandrum.
When he expressed his inability to travel to Delhi, the caller connected him via a Google Meet video call to a man posing as a Delhi police inspector, Vijay Kumar, seen in uniform with a morphed backdrop. The caller later claimed the case involved national security and threatened arrest, before introducing another person posing as a CBI officer, who alleged the phone number was linked to a human trafficking case.
The fraudsters instructed the victim to install WhatsApp, Signal and email on a new phone, assigned him a ‘code’, and demanded periodic check-ins to confirm his ‘safety’. After he returned to Hyderabad, they told him to isolate himself until the ‘enquiry’ was completed.
They later persuaded him to transfer Rs 15 lakh from his pension account and Rs 7 lakh from his savings bank account. After he transferred the money, they assured him the money would be refunded after verification. On December 19, the victim discovered online that he had been subjected to a digital arrest scam and approached the Hyderabad cybercrime police, who registered a case and launched an investigation.
CP urges caution against ‘ghost pairing’ scam
City CP VC Sajjanar has warned citizens about a new WhatsApp ‘ghost pairing’ scam, in which fraudsters can gain control of a user’s WhatsApp account without any OTP, merely by clicking a malicious link. In an X post on Sunday, the CP cautioned people against clicking messages such as, “Hey, I just found your photo,” even if they appear to come from known contacts. “This is a Ghost Pairing scam,” he said. According to Sajjanar, the link redirects users to a fake WhatsApp Web page and tricks them into pairing their WhatsApp account with a hacker’s device, without OTPs, SIM swaps or alerts. Once paired, scammers can read private chats, access photos, videos and contacts, send messages posing as the user and even lock the user out of their own account.