(image for representation)
| Photo Credit: REUTERS
When a five-member team from the Infopark police in Kochi, Kerala, turned up at her house in a village in Purulia, the westernmost district of West Bengal, with an arrest warrant, on Wednesday (January 22, 2025), Sulapa Mishra, a 54-year-old school teacher, was scared out of her wits.
She was even more in shock when the police, including two women, told her that she was accused in a case of an online scam worth ₹1.05 crore registered by a police station in faraway Kerala.
Soon, news spread, and a crowd of local residents formed who stopped the team from taking her away. Eventually, the visiting police team had to take the help of the West Bengal police. Now, charged under the IT Act and in judicial custody at the Viyyur Central Jail, Ms. Mishra still could not fathom what had hit her.
The Infopark police registered the case after a Kochi-based company manufacturing carpets, doormats and so on lodged a complaint that it was cheated of ₹1.05 crore. The company had transferred online ₹75 lakh and ₹30 lakh on a single day to two accounts under the impression that they belonged to a North India-based firm that supplied them the raw materials. The money was found to have been withdrawn through ATMs in Delhi and Punjab.
The company had received a mail seemingly from the supplier informing them that the account had been changed and provided the details of the other two accounts. The fraud came to light only when the company received a mail from the original supplier reminding them about the pending payment.
The account that received ₹75 lakh was found to be in Ms. Mishra’s name. It has emerged that she had opened the account and handed over the entire credentials, including the ATM card and SIM card for operating net banking, to a person whom she identified as a popular Bollywood musician, the police said.
“She had left a message on the social media fan page of this so-called popular musician three months ago. She was then contacted on her WhatsApp by a person claiming to be that musician. When she expressed suspicion, the man came on video call, and she was fully convinced. It seems like she was duped by artificial intelligence-driven deepfake,” said the police sources.
Since then, the yet-to-be-identified person had cheated her of ₹10 lakh, evidence of which the police have received, in the pretext of some family emergency.
“The other account to which ₹30 lakh was credited also probably operated by the fraudster by similarly duping some vulnerable person. We will have to nab the fraudster to unearth the multilayer racket,” the police said.
Published – January 24, 2025 04:25 pm IST
