Fake Telegram ids, faceless kingpins and a multi-crore cyber scam

Cyber crime team in Puducherry uncovers scam where victims lured into dubious enrichment scheme after getting paid for online tasks. Three persons arrested in Chennai. Victims include retirees, private sector employees & doctors. Police advise public to flag suspicious messages & avoid sharing bank details.

A new cyber scam has unravelled in the city where victims who got paid for mundane online tasks such as liking a YouTube channel or posting a positive review on a web portal, were later lured into a dubious enrichment scheme only to end up losing their money.

The cyber crime team investigating the complaint of a victim in Puducherry who lost more than ₹7 lakh in the scam has arrested three persons in Chennai, police said.

The modus operandi is initiated by establishing contact with a potential target via WhatsApp or Telegram with the offer of money without any investment for executing simple online tasks such as liking a YouTube channel, writing a comment on portal or subscribing to certain web content.

A WhatsApp number is provided to those joining the offer and links sent to the victims to complete the tasks. Trust is built when those who join get paid an amount for online assignments, as simple as, say, liking 10 YouTube channels. The fact that there is zero investment and easy money to be made draws unsuspecting persons into the scheme. The more the number of tasks, the higher the pay out.

“At this stage of the scam, depending on the nature of the person and how quickly he responded to the assignments, a range of offers are laid out against making a certain payment towards registration charges for the scheme”, Brijendra Kumar Yadav, SSP (Cyber Crime) told The Hindu.

With those initial paltry payments providing a veneer of credibility, tricksters lull their targets into glossing over the risks of shelling out money to a faceless payee. The subscribers are even sent a bar code to scan that provides a display of their investment and project gain. However, after they make payments, the link would no longer work and panic sets in.

The victims included retirees, private sector employees and even a few doctors. The down payments for offers promising a 10-15% return on investments ranged from ₹10,000 to about ₹30 lakh, police said.