Five men have been arrested for allegedly cheating an 80-year-old resident of Salt Lake.
One of the accused had contacted the victim over the phone and introduced himself as a representative of the e-commerce giant, Amazon, and convinced him to transfer more than Rs 40,000 for online shopping, police said.
The complaint was lodged in December 2020, following which the cyber cell of the Bidhannagar city police started a probe.
The five were arrested from the Regent Park and Golf Green area, where they were staying in rented apartments, on Tuesday.
Four of them are from Bihar and one from Jharkhand, the police said.
At least two of them have worked for an agency to which Amazon may have outsourced some operations, the police said.
The accused have been identified as Manish Kumar Jha, Kartick Kumar, Priyangshu Sharma, Rakesh Kumar and Dipak Kumar.
According to investigators, Priyangshu Sharma and Dipak Kumar have had access to the outsourced company’s client data that was used to cheat the complainant.
They were produced in court on Wednesday and remanded in police custody for five days, the police said.
The complainant, who is a retired bureaucrat, was tricked into divulging his card details and then the OTP he had received on his phone to gain access to his Net banking, the police said.
The police said they had seized 19 ATM cards, four PAN cards, six SIM cards, four mobile phones, one router, bank passbooks, cheque books and one Aadhaar card from the accused.
“The fraudsters had at first transferred Rs 40,686 from the complainant’s bank account into two e-wallets. The sum was then transferred to several other e-wallets in smaller amounts. The money was then deposited in several bank accounts,” said an officer of Bidhannagar city police.
An officer said that initially they had started tracking the money trail of the e-wallets through which the money was transferred.
“Finally, we managed to locate the bank accounts where the money was deposited,” said the officer.
Multiple bank accounts were traced and their holders were identified.