With increasing cases of COVID-19 and Mucormycosis reported the demand for certain drugs, fraudsters are looking for gullible victims. People, who pose as dealers of drugs like Remdesivir and Liposomal Amphotericin B, are the new entrants into online cheating.
The fraudsters engage in chats or calls over WhatsApp and convince the buyer that they are dealers of certain essential drugs.
Though they assure the buyer of delivering the drug after paying full or advance payment, their numbers will be ‘out of reach’ once they receive the payment.
One of such dealers The Hindu interacted with over WhatsApp quoted ₹ 7,900 for a vial of Liposomal Amphotericin B. For 24 vials, the dealer quoted ₹ 1.89 lakh, 50 % which was asked to be paid to an account number as advance. Later the rate was reduced to ₹ 5,880 per vial.
Though the dealer, who claimed to be from Chennai, used the name of a local pharmacy as the company name, the bank account number given to make the payment belonged to a bank at North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal.
Asked whether direct payment was possible and to collect the drug in person, the dealer declined to reply and continued to demand online payment. The dealer also shared a photo of his ‘delivery man’ to convince further. However, a search of the photo using Google Lens showed it was used by a newspaper for a report on online trading last year.
“I fell for the fraud as the person I interacted with posed as a dealer of Cipla and sent me an account number which had Cipla as account holder’s name. The person also listed his phone number as the customer care number of the pharmaceutical company,” says R. Raveendran of the Residents Awareness Association of Coimbatore.
Believing that the account number belonged to the real company, Mr. Raveendran made an online payment of ₹ 10,000, after which he had no response from the dealer.
“When I informed the bank about the cheating, I was told that only the account number and the IFSC code of the branch are run through the system during the processing of the payment and the account holder’s name is not matched with the account number. The fraudster had misused the name of the pharmaceutical company,” he says.
Mr. Raveendran has sent a complaint to Cipla mentioning that its name was being misused for cheating.
C. Sangu, Additional Superintendent of Police in-charge of the Cyber crime station, Coimbatore, said that the public should be careful about such scams.
According to him, the cyber crime station was yet to receive any complaint regarding cheating on the pretext of delivering essential drugs.
Published - May 26, 2021 10:12 pm IST
