An 83-year-old man was subjected to digital fraud in Pune. The thugs, posing as police officers, defrauded Rs 1.2 crore in the name of ‘digital arrest’. Due to this shock, he died of a heart attack a month later.
Mumbai: An 83-year-old man in Pune died a month after becoming a victim of digital fraud. Retired government employees were victims of cyber fraud. He was mentally broken after this incident. Online fraudsters had defrauded him of around Rs 1.2 crore. The matter came to light only when the wife lodged a complaint a week after her husband’s death. The children of the elderly couple live abroad. It all started in August, when a person called the elderly man claiming to be an officer of Colaba Police Station. The caller said he was an encounter specialist and the old man’s name was also involved in a money laundering case. He also said that the elderly’s bank account and Aadhaar information had been misused in a money laundering case involving a private airline company.
But the old man denied these allegations. After this, two more people started threatening him on another video call. One introduced himself as IPS officer Vijay Khanna and the other as CBI officer Daya Nayak. Both warned the couple that they would be arrested if they did not cooperate. Then, after being put on a video call for hours, they were told that they were under ‘digital arrest’. On the pretext of checking bank accounts, the fraudsters got them to transfer a total of Rs 1.19 crore to different accounts between August 16 and September 17. He was told that the money would be returned after the investigation was completed.
Cyber police say that when they came to know about the incident, officials advised the couple to file an FIR. But he said he would file a complaint after his daughter returned from abroad. But a few days later, the old man died of a heart attack. The wife told the investigating officers that her husband was under immense mental stress due to losing all his savings and constant harassment from the thugs. However, police say that a direct connection cannot be made between the death of the elderly and fraud. By the way, the investigation into cyber fraud is still going on.