Two persons from Uttar Pradesh, who cheated an octogenarian woman in the guise of reversal bonus points and loyalty bonus points to be claimed over her insurance policies, was arrested by Hyderabad cybercrimes police. The victim was duped to the tune of ₹ 15.37 lakh by Devansh Rastogi (27) and Imran Khan (22), both residents of Ghaziabad.
On March 3, a 80-year-old woman from Begumpet approached police stating that in October last she received a call from a person who introduced himself as Rajeev Agarwal, working as clerk in a Life Insurance company and informed her that if she takes insurance policies, she can get huge bonus and convinced her to believe his version.
The woman took four policies on her name. Later, in the name of processing fee and other charges to claim the loyalty bonus, reverser bonus, the fraudster collected ₹ 15,37,622 from her. “Even after paying such huge amounts, she has not received any bonus or her insurance policy amount and still they are demanding her to pay more. So she realised that she was cheated by fraudsters on pretext of getting bonus on her insurance policies,” Joint Commissioner of Police (Detective Department) Avinash Mohanty said. Based on her complaint, a case was registered and the duo was arrested.
Police seized 10 mobile phones, five debit cards of different banks, three bank passbooks, a cheque book and two stamps.
According to Mr. Mohanty, Devansh Rastogi hails from Bareilly and after completion of his studies, he worked in some private insurance companies at Noida as tele-caller. “Due to COVID-19 lockdown he didn’t get any salaries from his company, so he resigned his job in October last. Later, he met his childhood friend Manjeet Choudary, who also worked in insurance sector. As they both were in deep financial crisis to meet their lavish needs, they hatched a plan to cheat the gullible policy holders of the Insurance company,” he said.
In the process they acquired bank accounts from Imran Khan and started calling people randomly and succeeded in collecting amounts in the name of Insurance Policies reversal bonus points and loyalty bonus points.
“In this process, they trapped the complainant and pretended as if they were calling from an Insurance Company and asked her to join some policies and get the Insurance policies reversal bonus points for which she has to pay process charges, SEBI charges, GST charges, RBI charges and other charges and collected the money,” the Joint Commissioner said.
He cautioned public not to transfer funds/amounts in advance responding to online fraudsters, who pretend that they are calling from reputed Insurance companies.
