In these difficult times of pandemic, the cyber fraudsters continue to use Covid-19 as a tool to dupe people. The fraudsters are found duping people by offering to provide oxygen concentrators, providing them anti-viral drugs and so on, people have also been duped by using names of foreign pharmaceutical companies that are at the forefront of Covid-19 vaccine, revealed the data collected from the city police. According to the statistics, till April 30, the Mumbai Police had registered 777 cases of cyber frauds across the city, of which only 11 percent cases, that comes off to 84, have been detected so far. In light of these repeated online frauds, the state cyber department has already issued a warning, urging people to be more vigilant while doing online financial activities.
As per the statistics, most of the cases registered in the first four months were of credit card and online cheating, with 181 offences, followed by 78 cases of obscene SMSes and e-mails. Besides, police also registered 18 offences of morphing emails and fake social media profiling, four cases of phishing, two cases of tampering of source code and one case of spoofing registered till the end of April. As many as 493 offences, which fall in other categories, have been registered till April-end.
Recently, an 18-year-old boy from Chembur was duped to the tune of Rs 1.58 lakh while ordering an oxygen concentrator online. The boy was searching for concentrators for his ailing grandmother and contacted one 'distributer' whose number he found online. The distributor assured delivery in two days and accepted a complete payment advance but did not deliver the concentrators. The GST number given by him was later found out to be that of a garment shop.
Couple of days ago a businessman from South Mumbai was duped of Rs 1.7 crore. The cyber fraudsters posed purchase managers of an international pharmaceutical company which is in news for Covid-19 vaccine and lured the businessman to invest in raw material for cancer medicine.
With the ongoing shortage of Covid-related medicines, a number of people across the state have fallen prey to the online fraud on the pretext of procuring Remdesivir and Tocilizumab medicines through a prominent pharmaceutical company executive. In the light of these incidents, the company's corporate communications approached the Maharashtra Cyber Police and lodged a complaint.
