Representative image of fraud.
Credit: iStock Photo
Bengaluru: Four delivery partners exploited loopholes in the workings of Porter, a tech-enabled logistics app, to siphon off Rs 90 lakh in just eight months, police say.
The fraud was detected by Smart Shift Logistics Solutions Pvt Ltd, which owns Porter, during a business audit in July. An assistant manager in the company later filed a police complaint.
The police initially thought it was an inside job and verified the backend operations. But there was no foul play because most of the operations were automated.
Sarah Fathima, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast), later constituted a team under ACP (Electronics City subdivision) Govardhan Gopal and Southeast CEN police inspector Eshwari to trace all refunds from the company since January and identify multiple refunds to the same account.
Investigators were able to identify accounts that received multiple refunds. The money trail led the police to Shreyas TL, 29, from Hassan’s Hirisave. Based on his confession, they arrested Kaushik KS, 26; Ranganath PR, 26; and Anand Kumar, 30, all from Mandya.
Police found that the four men identified loopholes in such apps while working as cab drivers with ride-hailing firms and online food delivery partners. After trial and error, they found a perfect way to cheat customers.
In the Porter app, when a delivery duty is assigned to a particular driver, a part of the total bill is credited to his/her wallet. Customers get a quick refund if the driver refuses to provide the service. All these processes are automated.
The company also has a strict cancellation policy. A driver who cancels the service twice is blacklisted.
The four-member gang used this to their advantage. They used geo-spoofing (changing the device's geographical location to the desired place) to identify places with fewer Porter drivers, and placed delivery requests. Using their delivery accounts, they would accept these requests.
Once they received a portion of the bill amount in their wallet, they immediately transferred it to their bank accounts and cancelled the delivery. And after cancellation, they (customers) would cancel the order, too, and claim refunds.
Since their accounts would be blacklisted for cancelling delivery thrice, they bought fake phone numbers from Telegram groups and used them to create new accounts. They sometimes used geo-spoofing to change locations to neighbouring states, a senior police officer said.
The gang perfected the scam so well that they siphoned off Rs 90 lakh, police said.