Pune Woman Cheated Of Rs 3 Crore In Online Trading Scam

A Pune resident, in her late 50s, was defrauded of Rs 3 crore after being lured into a deceptive online share trading scheme through an Instagram advertisement. The woman fell victim to a scam between January and March, after she was offered a Rs 10,000 “trial seed fund”. The scam was sophisticated and resulted in significant financial losses for the woman.

The victim, hailing from the Mohammadwadi area, encountered the scam advertisement in January promising significant investment returns. Upon expressing interest, she was added to a WhatsApp group filled with purported success stories of massive profits through equity investments. After observing the group’s activities for nearly two months, she received Rs 10,000 which she used to begin trading via a mobile application later found to be fraudulent.

A woman fell prey to a scam where she made 30 transactions totalling Rs 3.04 crore to 12 different bank accounts over a month. The app she used deceived her by showing profits escalating to Rs 20.66 crore. When she tried to withdraw her funds, the fraudsters demanded 30 per cent of the apparent profits as “charity” and an additional 10 per cent as “fees.” It was then that she realized the scam and contacted Pune’s Cyber Crime Police Station, where a First Information Report (FIR) was filed last week.

This incident is part of a larger trend of rising online trading frauds reported by the Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad police, marking what cyber investigators describe as an epidemic. Similarly, a Pune-based Chartered Accountant was cheated out of Rs 3.4 crore. Here, too, the fraudsters used a WhatsApp group, deceptively named after a British financial institution, to promise high returns from sophisticated trading strategies such as “block trade” and “upper circuit trading.” The accountant incurred over Rs 2 crore in debts from various banks due to the scam.

In response to the increasing frequency of such frauds, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued an advisory on February 26, warning against fraudsters posing as SEBI-registered entities and misusing social media platforms to propagate their schemes. This cautionary notice aims to curb  growing financial scams and protect potential investors from falling prey to similar traps.