A delivery man, who was assigned to deliver a pizza worth Rs 561 at a south Calcutta address near SSKM Hospital early on Tuesday, was allegedly cheated of Rs 9,000 by a fake client.
The 24-year-old delivery man has lodged a complaint with the Alipore police station and reported a loss of Rs 9,000. The address where the pizza was to be delivered, turned out to be false, he claimed in his complaint.
The victim, Gopal Kumar Das, a second-year B.Tech student from a college in Budge Budge, said he was working part-time as a delivery man to fund his studies. He said the money he lost was kept for paying EMI for a laptop he had purchased and his examination fee.
Around 12.30 am on Tuesday, while he was on his way to the address from the Alipore outlet of the pizza store, he received the call.
Anyone ordering food through a food aggregator or directly from the outlet gets the option to directly speak to the delivery man once the person is assigned for that particular delivery. In this case, the fraudster who booked the pizza contacted Das.
“He (the caller) told me that he was from the army and was speaking from Jammu and Kashmir. He said he wanted to surprise his wife who was in Calcutta but had accidentally opted for the cash-on-delivery mode of payment. He requested me to help him and said he would transfer the amount to my account so that I could pay for the pizza,” Das told Metro.
“Moments later he sent me transaction details which reflected a money transfer of Rs 7,000. He then showed another transaction of Rs 2,000. He said he had made these transactions to the e-wallet connected to my mobile number. He claimed that it was a mistake on his part to send him Rs 9,000, while he should have sent only Rs 561,” Das said.
The youth said his “biggest mistake” was to not check his bank statement and transfer Rs 9,000 by scanning a QR Code that was sent to him over the phone and then waiting for him to send the correct amount.
Realisation dawned upon him when he reached the neighbourhood where the delivery was to be made and found there was no such address.
Then he checked his bank statement and found that no money had been sent to his account, only that Rs 9,000 had been debited which he initiated.
Officers of the cyber cell of the south division have started a probe.
In January this year, the driver of an app-based two-wheeler aggregator was allegedly cheated by an alleged fraudster who posed as a client and booked the two-wheeler from Ballygunge. The passenger had allegedly asked the driver to scan a QR code to receive the money. The driver lost Rs 15,000. In that case too, the address where the vehicle was booked had turned out to be fake.