2nd Year PG Orthopedics loses Rs 6 lakh to task based scammers

Ahmedabad: A second-year PG orthopedics resident doctor, recently became a victim of a task-based scam where he lost about Rs 6.23 lak. The 27-year-old doctor of BJ Medical College registered a complaint to Cybercrime police against the two people who were involved.

According to the FIR, Dr Brijesh received a message on Telegram in August from a lady named Nikitha Sharma, who was giving him part-time employment. Sharma later sent him a link after he contacted her, showing interest in the job. He was asked to follow a few steps. He was first required to pay Rs 10,000 before he was given any tasks. Brijesh was given the task of rating hotels, for which he got money ranging from Rs 30 to Rs 100 as mentioned in the TOI report.

Brijesh further mentioned that there was another person with whom he got in touch through Sharma’s Telegram. He had to pay a total of Rs 6.23 lakh, without suspecting even once. But after all that, he received just Rs 1,036 from the completion of the task, and that was the last time he ever got any money from them. He was now aware that he had been scammed and went directly to the Cybercrime police.

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Cybercrime police, acting on Brijesh’s allegation, filed a complaint on account of breach of trust, cheating, and criminal conspiracy under the IPC and the Information Technology Act.

Information collected by the cybercrime police showed that a similar crime task-based scam was committed in September, defrauding a share broker of Rs 2.5 crore.

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Task or part-time job-related frauds are run by a variety of gangs. Their method of operation is usually the same, just the jobs were different. The jobs range from rating businesses, products, or services on Google to rating random movies on YouTube. To earn the victim's confidence, they are first required to deposit small sums and receive cash prizes for completing each duty. However, the victim subsequently loses a substantial amount of money to the scammers.

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