According to the complainant, on the morning of June 28, he received a call from a mobile number where the caller introduced himself as the complainant’s company owner

A 58-year-old Panchkula resident was duped of ₹1.30 lakh after cyber fraudsters allegedly hacked the WhatsApp account of an associate Gujarat-based businessman and posed as him to seek money on the pretext of a medical emergency.

According to the FIR registered at the cyber crime police station, Panchkula, the complainant, Suresh Kumar Rohila, a resident of Sector 6, has worked with a tile company for several years and had a long-standing business association with Simpolo Ceramics in Morbi district of Gujarat, due to which he was personally acquainted with the company’s owner, Jitu Bhai.

In his complaint, Rohila said that on the morning of June 28, he received a call from a mobile number where the caller introduced himself as Jitu Bhai, claiming that his brother-in-law had met with an accident in Shimla and was admitted to PGIMER, Chandigarh, urgently asking for money for treatment.

The caller further told him that a company representative would later collect ₹5 lakh from him and asked him to transfer ₹1.30 lakh in the meantime to an ICICI Bank account, assuring him that the amount would be adjusted from the cash to be collected later.

Trusting the caller based on their longstanding business relationship, Rohila transferred ₹1 lakh from his Bank of Baroda account and ₹30,000 from his Canara Bank account to the bank account shared by the caller through WhatsApp.

However, when no company representative arrived to collect the remaining amount and the caller failed to provide a satisfactory explanation, Rohila became suspicious. He then contacted his associates in Morbi, who informed him that the WhatsApp account of the Simpolo Ceramics owner had been hacked. They also revealed that several people had already been cheated by fraudsters using the hacked account.

Realising that he had been defrauded, the complainant lodged a complaint on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. Acting on the complaint, the cyber crime police station, Panchkula, registered an FIR under Sections 318(4), 319 and 61(2) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) against the unknown accused.