Man loses Rs 1.52 crore to online part time job scam; three arrested

CHENNAI: The Cyber crime wing of Avadi City Police on Tuesday arrested three persons for being part of a cyber scam luring public into doing tasks online and promising exponential returns.

Online part time job scam involves scamsters promising money for doing simple online tasks such as fake Google reviews for tourist locations, hotels, watching YouTube videos among others.

As the victims get lured in, the scamsters make them pay to get access to the tasks and loot them.

A 64 year old man from Poonamallee, Muthukrishnan lost over Rs 1.52 crore to the scamsters recently and had filed a complaint with the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (1930) and the Avadi city police.

Muthukrishnan had worked for several years in Kuwait and was living his retirement life in India. He had got a link in Telegram app for online part time job to which he responded.

After initial returns for completing his tasks, Muthukrishnan invested more amount to get access to further tasks and got cheated, police said.

Avadi city police had also received another complaint from a 33 year old woman from Ernavoor, Dillikumari who lost Rs 8.3 lakh in a similar fashion.

The cyber crime team traced the bank accounts to which the victims’ money were routed and arrested Manikandan (33) of Pattabiram and Saddam Hussain (30) , Shanmugavel (31) of Perambur.

The three of them had opened bank accounts and have given access to scamsters abroad who operated the account.

The arrested trio got a commission for the same.

Manikandan was already arrested five months ago in a similar crime and was released on bail recently, police said.

All three of them were produced before a magistrate and remanded to judicial custody.