Officials of the Cyber police station at BKC, on Saturday, arrested a member of an online cheating gang, who would dupe youngsters across the country on social networking site by posting modelling jobs for advertisements offering lucrative pay as bait
Officials of the Cyber police station at BKC, on Saturday, arrested a member of an online cheating gang, who would dupe youngsters across the country on social networking site by posting modelling jobs for advertisements offering lucrative pay as bait.
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Lokesh Kumar, a resident of Ambedkar Nagar, South Delhi, was arrested under relevant sections of cheating and personation by using computer resource, on Saturday. According to the police, the complainant in the case is a city youth (name withheld), who came across a Facebook page titled 'Models Casting-Events Mumbai' in September last year.
The page had posted a job offer by a certain Deepak Kumar stating that good-looking females and males are required for photo shoots in Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chnnai and Bangalore. The post offered aspirant models Rs 15,000 for a day and Rs 1.35 lakh for nine-day shoot.
Since, the complainant was looking for a similar job, he responded to a mobile number given in the post and also sent his photograph on an e-mail ID as mentioned. Next day the complainant received a reply to his e-mail claiming that he has been selected for an ad shoot for Raymond company and he will be paid Rs 1.35 lakh for 9-days shoot, a source said.
"The complainant was asked to deposit Rs 10,000 in a given bank account for preparing an agreement file. However, the complainant did not pay money, as he had doubts about the person with whom he was interacting over emails. When the complainant expressed his doubt, the person, who identified himself as Lokesh Kumar, sent him his identification document proofs to win complainant’s confidence," another source said.
The complainant then transferred Rs 10,000 as per Lokesh's instruction. The complainant was informed by Lokesh that he would receive an e-mail mentioning the day, time and place he need to come for the shoot, however when the complainant did not receive such mail for days he realised that he was cheated. He then approached the cyber police station at BKC and lodged a complaint.
Cyber police officials worked on the case for months and after obtaining the record of the mobile number and the banking details used in the transactions, investigators zeroed in on Lokesh and traced him to Delhi. He was brought to Mumbai and was arrested on Saturday.
An officer said that the Lokesh had used his friend’s sister's bank account details, which he obtained on false pretexts. Police suspect that there are other associates of the accused who are cheating people across the country and are likely to make more arrests.