A man has been arrested on charges of cheating and impersonation after he allegedly posed as the CEO of an IT company and cheated two employees of the firm out of Rs 1.3 lakh, police said.
The women employees had received WhatsApp messages from accounts that bore the display picture of the company’s CEO, said a senior police officer of the Bidhannagar
Commissionerate.
According to the officer, the women had received messages from unknown numbers but the display picture on the WhatsApp accounts were of the CEO of the company.
The officer said that the women were asked to purchase gift cards of a company that manufactures high-end smartphones, laptops and
tablets.
“The sender of the messages managed to convince the women that he was indeed the CEO of the company where they work. Then they were asked to purchase gift cards for him. The caller had claimed that he was in the US at the moment and it was not possible for him to buy the gift cards,” said the officer.
The women were convinced that they had received messages from their boss and bought the gift cards worth Rs 1.3 lakh and passed the codes to him through WhatsApp.
The women later realised that they had been conned after they got to know that their company’s CEO had made no such requests.
“The women then lodged complaints with the cyber crime police station in Salt Lake,” said the officer.
Cops started a probe based on the complaint lodged by the women.
“The women could give us the number from where they had received the WhatsApp messages. The numbers helped us track down a man from Odisha,” said the officer.
A team from Salt Lake was sent to Odisha which arrested the accused from Nayagarh district on Monday.
The man has been identified as Biswa Ranjan Mahapatra, the police said.
He has been brought to the city on a transit remand and was produced before a court in Salt Lake that sent them to police remand for two days.
Another senior officer of the Bidhannagar Commissionerate’s cyber crime wing said that this was a fraud where the cheats would pose as senior executives of companies and create fake company email accounts as well as WhatsApp accounts and dupe people, especially those working there.
“We are now trying to find out where Mahapatra got hold of the databases of people working in the IT firm in Salt Lake,” said the officer.