Gujarat man googles bank number, loses Rs 1.3 lakh to cyber crooks

RAJKOT: A resident of Devbhumi Dwarka district lost Rs 1.29 lakh to cyber frauds when he searched for the customer care number of a nationalized bank.
Police arrested the two persons from Vadodara who had committed the cybercrime. The cyber crime police of Dwarka launched an investigation after getting a complaint from Jitendra Pankhaniya, a resident of Arambhada village near the temple town.
Police arrested Rahul Parmar (31), who runs a tea stall, and Mohammed Saeed (46) who has a cutlery store in Vadodara.
Pankhaniya had a protection plan in his credit card and he wanted to discontinue it. He searched for the customer care numbers of the State Bank of India (SBI) in Google and came on the radar of cyber crooks. He received a call from a person posing as an executive of the bank, who won his trust and extracted credit card details and OTP. Within a few minutes, Pankhanya lost Rs 1.29 lakh from the bank.
Using technical surveillance, police found the money trail with the bank account numbers of Vadodara and arrested the two accused.
Parmar was earlier arrested in cyber fraud by Faridabad cyber cell central police station and was sent to jail there. In the jail, he met Satyam, a resident of Delhi and they became friends. After being enlarged on bail, they started to cheat people through cyber fraud. Satyam put up a fraudulent SBI customer care number in the search engine and received calls from all those who called on the number. Satyam used to get their credit card details and OTP and pass them it to Parmar. Parmar used to get the amount transferred using these details for which he used two bank accounts of Saeed.
AY Baloch, police inspector, cyber crime cell, Devbhumi Dwarka district, said, “Parmar used the credit card details to transfer the siphoned amounts to Saeed’s account, and later they used to withdraw the money. We got the money refunded to the victim. We have found a total transaction of Rs 10.50 lakh in this account and the entire amount was withdrawn. We are investigating who were the other victims who lost their money at the hands of these people.” Baloch said they have secured seven days remand of Parmar to get more details about the mastermind Satyam.