AHMEDABAD: The Enforcement Directorate is in the news almost every day, conducting a series of raids and seizing assets worth crores of rupees, and cybercrooks seem to have noted this. The Cybercrime police have uncovered several cases where Amdavadis were intimidated by threats of ED action and swindled out of significant amounts of money.
In April, a businessman from Satellite fell victim to scammers who threatened to implicate him in the Nawab Malik case, an investigation pursued by the ED. The fraudsters, posing as Mumbai police officers, duped Shrenik Vaishnav, a 58-year-old retired Torrent Power employee, out of Rs 41 lakh by accusing him of laundering money in collusion with Malik, who has been under ED scrutiny.
They even invoked the names of top police officers like Navi Mumbai police commissioner Bharambe and Mumbai police DCP Pradip Sawant to coerce Vaishnav into parting with his money, stated an FIR lodged by the Cybercrime police on April 24.
Similarly, just last week, a resident of Bodakdev was defrauded of Rs 4.50 lakh after threatening to link him to Naresh Goyal, the Jet Airways founder accused of laundering money and misappropriating loans worth Rs 538.62 crore from Canara Bank. Sunil Mathur, a marketing manager with an automobile company and resident of Nandanbag Society in Shela, received a call on March 27 from someone posing as a Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) officer.
The caller threatened to disconnect Mathur’s phone number and freeze his bank account, claiming the Mumbai police had filed an FIR against him for a money laundering case under ED investigation.
They kept Mathur on the edge by seeking hourly updates about his whereabouts and his activities. They also asked him to transfer Rs 4.37 lakh into their account so that “they could check if he had black money”. Mathur transferred the money, and the scamsters disappeared with it.
Gujarat police sources suggest that cybercriminals often exploit high-profile cases whenever there is heightened media coverage of the ED. “Many victims do not report these crimes, so the true scale of these frauds is unknown. This modus operandi was previously observed in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi. Now, a new trend has emerged where people from Gujarat are being targeted with threats of ED cases,” a police officer explained.
In Sept 2022, Deepali Shah, a 45-year-old accountant from Satellite, was conned out of Rs 90 lakh by various cybercriminals who threatened her with action by the Income Tax department, police and ED in an alleged terror funding case.
Commenting on these incidents, the police officer noted that cybercriminals often select high-profile cases to deceive their victims. “People are often aware of these cases, and cybercriminals exploit this awareness to their advantage,” the officer added.
