THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : Cyber scammers defrauded a whopping amount of Rs 33 cr from Thiruvananthapuram city limits in the first six months of this year. The data released by the city police said Rs 23 crore was lost to investment frauds, while video liking and share market scam resulted in the loss of Rs 4 crore.
Deputy Commissioner Nidhinraj P said 60 cases pertaining to investment fraud were registered in the city stations in the past six months and the victims mostly hailed from the upper echelons of society. The scammers also targeted gullible people through fake job scam, enforcement officer scam and fedex scam. He said the scammers mostly hailed from outside the state and they identified their victims in two ways.
“Victims are either randomly selected or targeted through scheming operations. In random cases, the scammers target some 30 people and might get a victim. In targeted operations, they collect the data of the potentials from social media platforms,” he said.
According to the officer, out of 35 people arrested by the city police this year for cyber fraud, 25 were from outside the state.
“The victims have revealed that most of the fraudsters talked in English or Hindi,” he added. The scale of cyber fraud has alarmingly gone up in the recent times. In 2022, Rs 2.29 cr was lost from the city, while it rose to Rs 18.37 cr in 2023. This year, till June Rs 3.7 cr has been held in the bank accounts by the law enforcement agencies, while Rs 11 lakh has been retrieved.
The investigations have revealed that bank accounts were up for sale by certain people through which the defrauded money was transacted and there were agents operating, who acted as links between the fraudsters and the bank account holders. The bank account holders were complicit in the crime as they were sometimes offered 10 per cent of the total transacted amount as commission.
The scamsters conned their victims by engaging with them for long and short periods. In investment fraud, the scamsters kept engaging with the victims for an extended period, while in the enforcement officer scam, the communication was brief.