A senior citizen who tried booking an air ticket online ended up losing Rs 7 lakh to fraudsters on December 30.
Kumar (name changed) has said in his police complaint that he was trying to book a flight ticket to Thiruvananthapuram on January 18 using a mobile application. Though he had finished making the payment, he received a text message saying the fund transfer has not gone through. He later realised that Rs 7 lakh had been siphoned from his account.
When Kumar called the ticket booking firm’s customer care number, a man introducing himself as Deepak Kumar Sharma told him that he was unable to return the amount due to technical issues and asked Kumar to provide details of a different bank account.
Though Kumar gave him only the last four digits of the account number, he received several OTPs of bank transactions that happened without his knowledge. Whitefield police have taken up a case under cheating and the Information Technology Act and have launched an investigation.