Although OLX insists that customers make deals through their app, many of these complainants called the sellers’ private number in the advertisement. (Photo fore representational purpose)
About 70 complaints by OLX users in Chennai, alleging that they were cheated by sellers posing as Army officers, have led Chennai police to Bharatpur in Rajasthan.
According to the complaints, the modus operandi in these cases was that accounts created on the online portal in the name of Army officers posted advertisements for sale of vehicles. Some of these seller profiles also had photos of Army officers’ IDs and of them in their uniforms. Although OLX insists that customers make deals through their app, many of these complainants called the sellers’ private number in the advertisement.
“Once they called and spoke to the ‘Army officer’ selling the vehicle, they were convinced and immediately transferred the amount through digital wallets. Within a week or two, they realised there is an unusual delay in the delivery of the vehicle and found the phone number switched off. We have received some 70 similar complaints and Kerala, Andhra, Telangana have reported hundreds of such cases,” said Deputy Joint Commissioner Saravana Kumar.
Tamil Nadu Central Crime Branch’s Additional Commissioner C Easwara Moorthy directed the Deputy Commissioner G Nagajothi to form a team and get the cases probed. Kumar was tasked to head the team.
When police traced the numbers used in the fraud cases, most of them led to Rudawal village in Bharatpur district. While 85 per cent of the calls originated from the Bharatpur region, Alwar district in Rajasthan and Mewat and Punhana in Haryana were found to be the other hotbeds of such frauds.
On Friday, a team of seven police officers headed by Kumar arrested two suspects from Bharatpur and took them to Chennai. According to Kumar, it may be near impossible to bust the entire gang as almost the entire region has so many people involved in similar crimes.
What led to the arrest of the two persons last week was a pattern noticed with a bank account in Punjab National Bank’s Bharatpur branch in which at least 10 complainants deposited money. “We traced this bank account. But soon we learnt that account holder had transferred the amount to his wife’s account. When we questioned him at Bharatpur, he claimed that he was merely handling money for people from Rudawal. We traced the movement of two people actively part of the scam from Rudawal to Bharatpur town and nabbed them when they came out of their villages,” Kumar said.
An officer who visited Bharatpur for the investigation said they met the Panchayat leader. “He said it is not a news for them. He casually said that he has been telling people to avoid this but that no one listened to him,” the officer said.
“We have received information about 10 more specific persons and we will soon seek help of Rajasthan officers for their arrest,” Kumar said.