techie

Royal Enfield bike

OLX

ID card

Thinking that Rs 65,000 was a good price to pay for a Bullet, he ended up paying fraudsters Rs 1 lakhA 26-year-old, who was in a tearing hurry to buy a, managed to miss several alert messages and ran right into a trap set by a fraudster on an online marketplace. He ended up losing Rs. 1 lakh in the deal.A person, who claimed he was from the Indian Army had put up an ad on the website,, to sell a Royal Enfield. Dinesh Nair (Name changed), a resident of Kaikondrahalli and a native of Odisha, was interested in buying this bike. He contacted the seller and left his contact number. In the meantime, the website deleted the seller’s account and alerted Nair that the post had been deleted as the account holder was a suspicious user. Even before blocking the suspicious account, the website had alerted Nair not to make any advance payments.Nair claims he did not go through the alert messages. This turned out to be a costly miss.Nair told Mirror he fell for the offer on the account in the name of Omprakash Parashar to sell his Bullet for Rs. 80,000. “On Wednesday morning, I left him a message and he told me that it was available and asked me to share my number. When he did not call me back, I checked the ad and saw it was removed. I left him another message asking if the bike was still available but the messages weren’t delivered. Around 2 pm, the man called me and introduced himself, saying he was from the Indian Army,” Nair told BM.The man claimed he stays in Domlur and asked Nair if he was interested in the bike. “I told him I was and asked him why he had removed the post. He told me that he was in a hurry to sell the bike and someone had agreed to purchase it so he removed the ad but that person did not go ahead with the deal. He agreed to sell the bike to me for Rs. 65,000 and asked me to make some advance payment. He promised to deliver it immediately,” Nair said.First Nair sent him Rs 5,000 and Rs 32,000 as advance and delivery charges. The man then told Nair that there was some problem at his end, and he must make full payment. Here he added a convincing touch by making a third person speak to Nair. “The other man claimed to be his senior officer.He shared hisand other details. I sent the full amount online but they asked me to send some more towards obtaining an no-objection certificate from the Army and claimed that the amount would be refunded. I ended up sending Rs. 1,01,000 and when I called them to check for delivery status, his phone was switched off,” he said.Nair then went back to OLX to raise a complaint against the user and learnt that someone had raised a complaint in the morning due to which the dubious post had been removed.