KOCHI: Beware of calls and emails from job portals showering promises. For even highly-educated people are losing money after falling into such traps. A 51-year-old Anjumana resident, Anitha Narayanan, lost around Rs 2.38 lakh after she was coaxed into registering with a job portal.
Having worked as a financial officer with various business firms over the past several years, Anitha was left searching for a job due to the Covid pandemic. That is when she received a call from a person, named Shiva, claiming to be representing the job portal www.shine.com last October, she said. He promised to find her a job on payment of Rs 3,000 as registration fee.
The next day, after registering, she received another call demanding Rs 5,000 for ID authentication. When she refused, they convinced her to pay the second transaction too. Later, a third call was received from a person named Rohit who asked for more money. This time, however, she refused to pay the amount and asked him to refund the Rs 8,000 paid on two earlier occasions.
Anitha said the man agreed to pay the refund and asked her to visit a portal named www.shinecomplaint.co.in. She was then asked to pay Rs 10 to process the refund by a woman. “As I initiated the payment of Rs 10, they tracked my bank account details. Initially, I was receiving messages that my transaction is declined. But later it was found that Rs 2 lakh was debited from the account.
When I raised the matter with the person who contacted me, she asked me to share the receipt for the Rs 2 lakh debit. When that was shared, another Rs 30,000 was debited from my account. The woman claimed that the transaction happened due to some mistake and that the money would be repaid in full soon. But no amount has been received so far,” Anitha said.
Though she approached her bank, the authorities there, instead of offering assistance, blamed her for transacting with fake websites. Anitha found that the calls she received were from Gurugram. Based on her complaint, the Kochi Cyber police station registered a case in November. Station House Officer Renjith K Vishwanath said that investigation is progressing. He said that numerous complaints are being received on the loss of money after registering for jobs with various portals.