The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Online frauds on the rise lAW & order

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 03, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Online frauds on the rise lAW & order

Tricksters are adopting various means to cheat people using Internet, writes Marri Ramu

Nigerian fraud, advance fee fraud or 419 cheating. The names are different but all of them involve the same confidence trick of persuading unsuspecting Internet browsers to advance sums of money in the hope of realising a very much larger gain.

As the number of Internet users is going up, so is the graph of such frauds. Changing of baits by fraudsters, police believe, is an important reason.

Modus operandi

Normally, the tricksters used to send e-mails to a person claiming the latter had won an online lottery prize. He would ask the e-mail receiver to deposit in specified bank accounts sums of Rs. 25,000 or Rs. 50,000. Within minutes of the amount deposited in the account, the fraudster would withdraw it and would never come into contact again. Of late, they replaced the baits of lottery prizes with jobs in reputed companies.

Recently, a Hyderabadi youth got an e-mail in the name of Wipro company stating he was selected for the company’s project.

The mail read that his curriculum vitae was selected from naukri.com, the interview would be held at Dehradun and the offer letter along with to and fro air tickets would be sent by courier.

‘But send Rs. 4,100 through bank confirming your appearance for the interview. The expenditure incurred by you including the security deposit would be reimbursed later’, it stated.

The youth smelt rat and realised it was a fake mail after contacting some company executives. In other cases, the cheats used to dupe youths with false assurances of providing jobs abroad.

As the police undertook campaign about such online frauds, the number of cases had come down. Investigators say sending e-mails directly in the name of reputed Indian software companies is the new trick.

People tend to believe if the e-mail is in the company’s name and rush to deposit money because the sums are meagre compared to the huge salaries offered in software industry.

In another case, a fraudster sent an e-mail to a woman in Amberpet stating that he had secured huge sums of money following sale of property and decided to give away part of it to an Internet browser by random selection.

He asked her to deposit money in his account stating that was mandatory as per international rules. The woman was duped of nearly Rs. 10 lakhs.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Andhra Pradesh