A Bengal police officer clicked on a link that he thought was sent by a bank official to upgrade his credit card and was defrauded.
The money fraudulently transacted from his account was used to purchase a mobile phone online, which was delivered to an address in Punjab, police said on Monday. The phone was then sold to a retailer and it finally landed up in Jammu and Kashmir, the police said.
Based on a complaint lodged with the Bengal CID, two persons were arrested from Punjab. The phone has been recovered from J&K.
The state CID initiated a probe in December 2022 and tracked down the phone’s location to Baramullah district of J&K.
“The person who had the phone told us he had purchased it from a local shop and had a valid invoice. When we questioned the shop owner, he showed an invoice from an online portal, which turned out to be fake. We learnt he had purchased it at a discount from a dealer in Punjab,” an officer on the probe team said.
A team went to the Punjab address where the phone had been delivered according to the purchase order on the online portal.
“It turned out to be a dead lead. The person in whose name the order was booked turned out to be fictitious. Based on information from the Baramullah shopkeeper to whom the phone was sold, we located those behind the fraud,” the officer said.
The suspects — Dimpy from Patiala district and Karan Gupta of Bhatinda district — were arrested from their homes on June 15.
“The accused have been running a racket of cheating people by posing as bank officials and sending them links with malware on the pretext of credit card upgrades. They get remote access to the victims’ phones and make fraudulent transactions,” said a CID officer.