A 25-year old man was recently arrested by Delhi Police from Thane, Maharashtra for defrauding people by posing as Ola electric scooter dealer. Furthermore, the accused has been identified as Rajendra Sharma Panda.
Diving into details, Panda is a resident of Dombivali East in Thane, and he defrauded a few people by creating fake advertisements on Google by posing as a dealer of ‘Ola electric scooty’.
The fraudster was nabbed after an FIR was registered at Cyber Dwaraka police station by a victim of this fraudster. According to the complainant, he was searching for an electric scooter on Google and came across the contact of an “Ola electric scooter dealer” by the name of ‘Raghav Sharma’.
The story continues with the complainant reaching out to the phone number on the advertisement and the alleged person requested a payment of Rs 499 towards the booking of the Ola electric scooter.
After the amount has been paid, the fraudster demanded an additional sum of Rs 80,999 in order to deliver the Ola electric scooter within a week, which unfortunately, was paid by the complainant.
However, things soon became suspicious after the complainant demanded a receipt for the payment and demanded an additional Rs 20,000. Subsequently, the phone number of the accused was also switched off.
In the investigation based on the FIR, it was found out that the accused transferred Rs 80,999 to a HDFC bank and some more amount was transferred from the stated bank account to GP Parsik bank, and this amount was later withdrawn from an ATM.
Checking these bank accounts, it was confirmed that these bank accounts were registered in Panda’s name, but the accused was no more living at the registered addresses given to the bank.
Though it may seem like a dead end, the Police were quick to analyse the accused’s call records, through which it was found out that the accused is living in Dombivali East. Later he was arrested by the police and he admitted to the crime.
Fake advertisements on trusted platforms such as Google has become a menace to both the public and the police. As such, companies such as Google must come up with better solutions to address such issues in their platform.
