A 33-year-old man from Delhi was arrested for allegedly duping the manager of a private bank he had met on Facebook to the tune of Rs 3.71 lakh. Police said the accused, identified as Satyandra Pratap Sovaram Singh, had befriended several women on Facebook and later duped them of cash under the pretext of sending valuable gifts from abroad.
He worked with two accomplices, added police: a Nigerian national who identified himself as Sandy and another woman. In November 2018, a case of cheating was registered in Powai. According to the complainant, in mid-2018, she accepted the Facebook friend request of Satyandra, who told her that he was a UK-based businessman. They started chatting on a regular basis.
An officer from Powai police station said, “Later, they shared each phone numbers and started talking. The accused took the woman’s residential address and said he would send her gifts from the UK.” Two days later, added the police officer, she got a call from the female accomplice of the accused, telling her that a parcel had arrived for her. The caller also told her that as it contained dollars and jewellery of high value, she would have to pay custom charges.
“After seeking re-assurance from the accused, she paid Rs 3.71 lakh in different transactions. Later, when they stopped contacting her, she realised that she was duped. The bank manager then came to the police station and registered a case,” said an officer.
The investigating team looked into bank account details and call data records. “We took the number of the accused from the complainant and also started working on the bank account documents from which we extracted an optional phone number provided to the bank that was still functional. We then scrutinised the call data records of that number on the basis of which the suspect was traced to Delhi,” said Assistant Police Inspector Nilesh Patil.
A team was sent and after waiting outside his residence for three consecutive days, he was nabbed.
“We took help from the Delhi Police and took him in custody. He was arrested and brought to Mumbai on Tuesday,” said an officer.
The accused told police that he had duped over 100 people across India. “The foreign national was responsible for holding conversations with the targets. The woman was given the job of posing as a custom officer, while he would look for prospective targets,” said an
officer.
