Fake ‘Work from Home’ job syndicate fleecing people busted

Fraudsters are every day finding innovative ways to dupe people and take advantage of naive people by ‘social engineering scams. This time, a gang came up with an idea to exploit 2020’s most popular term — Work From Home — as this system of work found prominence due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Delhi Police’s newly-created Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Ops (IFSO) unit has busted a module involved in extortion and cheating gullible job aspirants in the name of providing Work From Home.

The culprits, through fake job portals, used to give work targets to the victims that they were not able to meet within the stipulated time frame and were subsequently made to pay penalties for that.

DCP, IFSO, K.P.S. Malhotra said some complaints were received in Cyber Crime Unit alleging that websites such as theresumesearch.com, www.jobsearchnet.in, and resumetofill.com are engaged in cheating innocent people by promising them to work from home jobs and giving them an impossible task to complete.

“The fraudsters used to extort money by threatening them to drag into court for not completing the task,” he said.

During the enquiry, a search on National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) was conducted regarding similar complaints all over India and it is revealed that there are more than 60 complaints lodged by different victims with similar allegations as levelled above. A case was registered and the investigation was launched.

Based on technical enquiry, the IFSO team apprehended four accused people identified as R. Kumar, M. Singh, T.Kumar and a woman, all residents of Delhi.

During interrogation, accused persons disclosed that R. Kumar had created the websites and started to call unemployed persons for data entry jobs. They allured the innocent persons for the job of resume filling and used to provide hefty data which cannot be completed within the stipulated time frame. Thereafter, the accused started to call the victims and extorted money by threatening them with court cases for not completing the task.

The police official advised the general public to check the authenticity of any job portal before divulging their personal details.