Maharashtra: Engineer foils fraudster’s bid to dupe MSEDCL employees by posing as chairman

An FIR was registered in this regard by Nirmal Nagar police in Mumbai’s Khar (East) on Thursday, officers said. The 44-year-old complainant in the case is an MSEDCL executive engineer. He said that on August 3 he received a WhatsApp message from a number that bore a photograph of MSEDCL chairman Vijay Singhal. In the message, the fraudster introduced himself as Singhal and said he was in urgent need of money and asked for Rs 50,000, the complainant said.

This is not the first case in which fraudsters have posed as senior government officials to dupe people, officers said. In the past, swindlers have used the same modus operandi and posed as senior IT officials and even as the chief justice of the high court in a bid to cheat people of money, they added.

Suspecting that something was amiss, the complainant made a phone call as well as a video call on the WhatsApp number, but the fraudster disconnected the calls, he said. Realising that the person was fake, the engineer took screenshots of the profile and the messages and posted it on their office WhatsApp group to alert other MSEDCL employees.

Soon after posting the message, other officials of the company shared in the group that they too had received such messages, officers said. The engineer then approached the police with the complaint.