Tripura: Social Media friendship goes wrong; woman falls prey to Rs 4 lakh fraud

A wrong friendship approval in a social networking site landed a housewife of AD Nagar area, Tripura entangled in a trap of greed, deception and a big financial fraud. The woman reported having transferred a huge amount of money in order to get a courier box full of money and gold ornaments that would “come all the way from the United Kingdom”. As expected nothing did arrive.

The incident also unfolded as to how people using social media and the web were befooling people and making them fall prey of financial frauds.

The incident came into fore when the woman lodged a complaint at the AD Nagar police station, Tripura against some unknown people who claimed to have committed an online forgery with her.

Speaking on the issue a police official said, the victim housewife developed a friendship with a man who was said to be based in the United Kingdom and was posted at a big position in some big private farm. The friendship became closer day by day and the woman started to share her financial situations with the man.

Taking advantage of her financial problems, the man promised to help her by giving her some money. According to the woman, police said, she was promised to be given Rs 70 lakh along with some gold ornaments. “The man has forwarded some photos of the box she is expected to get after it reaches Tripura. In the picture and videos, it has been seen that some gold ornaments and some international currency are being stuffed in a box”, the police officer said.

Almost a month later, he said, the woman got a call from some courier service. The courier service people told her to transfer a sum Rs 2 lakh to a given bank account so that they could forward the parcel to her residence with the international currency converted into Indian currency. Accordingly, the woman from Tripura transferred the money.

Within a week, she got another call with another directive according to which she had to transfer Rs 2 lakh more as her money was not enough to suffice the expenses required to convert the currency. The woman once again repeated the same mistake and transferred the money but unfortunately, the demand for more money came henceforth prompting her to approach the police in Tripura.

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The police registered a complaint and started to probe the matter but still there were no breakthroughs in the case. According to the investigating officer, all the bank accounts and phone numbers used in the case were put on surveillance and it had been observed that all of the kingpins of the case were from Delhi. A team of police might leave for Delhi after proper communication with the Delhi police.

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