The Hindu : National : Cyber conmen on the prowl

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Tuesday, Dec 04, 2007
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Cyber conmen on the prowl

S.Ramu

A net-savvy employee falls prey to an e-mail that declares him ‘winner’ of a lottery and loses Rs. 2 lakh

IN THE DOCK: A.Venkateswara Rao, OSD, producing Elumachiboy, a Nigerian, at a press conference at Nalgonda on Monday.

NALGONDA: Netizens beware! Don’t get into the trap of e-mail that announces you ‘the winner’ of any lottery with attractive prize money. Don’t transfer your money to foreign banks as advised by the ‘e-mail friend’ and cut a sorry figure later like Srinivas of Miryalaguda in Nalgonda district.

Computer savvy Srinivas, an employee of a private firm, was surprised to find an e-mail in his mailbox on June 27, 2007. It announced that he had won the Spanish Euro lottery worth 6.87 lakh Euros (about Rs. 4 crore) and some formalities were to be done to get it transferred into his account.

“Initially, I ignored the mail. After sometime, I was asked to send a letter of disclaimer along with my bio-data. I made a mistake by doing so. Based on the information provided by me, they contacted me over phone and made me believe that I had won the lottery by chance,” Srinivas told The Hindu.

“I received another mail on July 27 in which I was asked to send Rs. 42,650 to the Park Central Bank in Johannesburg, South Africa, as activation fee. After a search on the Internet, I found that a bank exists by the name and I transferred the money to a particular account,” Srinivas said. The ‘organisers’ of the lottery again asked him to send another Rs. 1.40 lakh to convert the Euros into Indian currency. Driven by avarice, Srinivas scrupulously followed their instructions. Even as he was trying to contact the ‘organisers’ to send the amount to his account as early as possible, they called him up on November 24 to say that another Rs. 50,000 was needed to get the things done. “They asked me to come down to Mumbai or New Delhi to hand over the amount to their agent,” he said.

Alerts SP

Suspecting foul play, Srinivas approached Superintendent of Police Vijay Kumar and lodged a complaint. As per a plan drawn up by the police, Srinivas invited the agent to Secunderabad. Consequently, a resident of Lagos in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Elumachiboy, fell into the police trap, in-charge ASP A. Venkateswara Rao said. “Though I am an educated person, I fell into their trap,” Srinivas said.

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