pizza

Nagulmeera Vali Shaik

cancer treatment

cybercrime

Bengaluru

Bangalore

Ordering acould leave you with a whole lot of guilt for the carb and cheese overload. But whatis feeling a whole different kind of guilt compounded by helplessness and despair. Shaik fell prey to a cyber fraud and lost nearly a lakh of rupees that he had earmarked for his mother’sThe incident happened on Sunday when the techie placed an order for a pizza through a food delivery app. When his pizza order did not come through after 45 minutes, Shaik decided to cancel the order and ask for a refund of Rs 130 from the food delivery application. When he was not satisfied with the automated response from the customer care number displayed on the app, he looked for an alternate number for the app’s customer care on Google.Unfortunately for him, the call was answered by fraudsters. They sent him a link and said that upon clicking it, the money would be refunded to him. But within minutes he found Rs 95,000 was deducted from his account. This was not just his salary but money he was planning to pay his mother’s cancer treatment bills.Shaik lost many, many times more than the refund amount due to devious cyber crooks. This is not the first instance ofinvolving digital transactions reported in the last few days in. On December 4th ,Mirror had reported about a man losing money from his mobile wallet and another who gave his UPI ID and found Rs 85,000 deducted from his account. Of late, the city has seen a spate of cases where innocent citizens’ accounts were cleaned out due to skimming machines attached to ATMs.Shaik, a resident of Koramangala and a software engineer with a private firm filed a complaint with the Madiwala police on Monday. He said that on Sunday afternoon at around 3:30 pm, he had ordered a pizza from a food delivery application and due to an error, the order status showed processing for almost 45 minutes. “Since the amount was deducted from my account and I was not able to track my order, I tried their helpline number which was on the application. It was an automated call and I did not get a proper response. So I searched for the contact number of customer care service on Google and tried again. It rang once and the call got disconnected.Then I got a call from the same number and someone informed me that my order has been cancelled,” said Shaik. The callers then asked him if he wanted a refund and when he said yes, they sent him a link. Shaik said, “They asked me to fill the form and give them my UPI ID to which the refund was supposed to be initiated. I was asked to fill my contact number which was linked to the UPI ID as well. Within seconds, I started receiving messages that Rs 45,000 was being deducted from my bank account in three transactions. Afraid I would lose the remaining Rs 50,000, I transferred this to my other private account. To my shock, they were able to siphon off Rs 50,000 from that account as well. I had not shared the UPI ID of that account but somehow they managed to deduct the money.”He added that this was his salary which had been credited to his account just a day before. He said, “I was supposed to pay for my mother’s hospital bills this week and now I’m left with no money. I have filed a complaint with the bank as well as the Madiwala police.” A case has been registered under Information Technology Act and further investigation is underway.