An elderly woman from Anandapur whose children stay abroad said she was forced to be on a video call for eight days at a stretch by fraudsters, who claimed that a courier containing drugs and 16 illegal passports had been booked using her Aadhaar card.

Threatened with arrest and the cancellation of her children’s visas, the 70-year-old mother of two liquidated her fixed deposits and sold her jewellery to pay ₹36.8 lakh to the fraudsters, who posed as cops from Mumbai.

“I had no option but to sell my jewellery and liquidate my FDs when they said they would cancel my children’s visas,” said the retired teacher, who stays alone in her Anandapur apartment.

The call came on April 30. The caller, a woman, told the 70-year-old complainant that her Aadhaar card had been used to book a consignment containing drugs and 16 illegal passports.

“My daughter was sending me a few things from abroad. So I thought the woman was speaking about those consignments,” the retired teacher told The Telegraph.

Then the phone was transferred to a man, who started giving instructions to the elderly woman.

“I was told to download Skype. I told him that I was unable to do so. Then he offered to initiate a video call on WhatsApp, to which I agreed. The call started on April 30. He showed me a document with my name and said it was an FIR,” she recalled.

“Over the next three days he and another officer, who was wearing a police uniform, kept telling me that it was a very serious offence. They convinced me not to disconnect the call because, they said, I could get arrested any moment.

“I was so exhausted that sometimes I felt ‘let them arrest me’ because I knew I was innocent and would get out soon. But then the thought of police coming to my apartment and taking me along... gave me cold feet. I continued to do what they ordered me,” she said.

On the fourth day, the fraudsters spoke about her money. They asked her how many bank accounts and how much money she had. Then they said she needed to transfer all her money into the government exchequer immediately and assured her that the entire sum would be refunded.

“I started transferring my money. Most of the money was from the sale of a flat that my late husband had purchased in New Town. The men then asked if I had any FD and jewellery,” she said.

The fraudsters forced her to liquidate her FDs and sell her jewellery.

All this while, the complainant was on video call.

When the woman tried to disconnect the call saying her phone had run out of charge, they insisted that she got it charged from a power bank. The threats of arrest and cancellation of visa of her children kept her going.

Her children and other family members panicked as she failed to answer their calls.

On May 7, minutes after selling her jewellery, she broke down and answered a call from her younger brother, who had been trying to contact her frantically.

Once she narrated the whole episode to her brother, realisation dawned on her that she had been cheated.

The woman lodged a complaint with Anandapur police station and then the cybercrime cell of Kolkata Police’s east division. “We are investigating the complaint,” an officer said.