Gujarat couple loses Rs 1 crore in a online movie review scam, here is what happened

By Divya BhatiIn a recent work-from-home scam, a couple from Jamnagar, Gujarat lost a total of Rs 1.12 crore to cyber crooks. The couple was reportedly tricked by scammers on the pretext of earning extra income through working from home in the ticketing business. The couple was asked to buy movie tickets and rate movies from different languages.

According to the incident reported by Times of India, the couple received an advertising message of work-from-home opportunity on Telegram. “You can earn by sitting at home at your comfort, only you have to give ratings to the movies,” read the message they received on the instant messaging platform. The message further promised a daily earnings between Rs 2500 and 5,000 with the daily work.

To know more about the opportunity, the couple approached the sender who further asked the victims to register themselves on a “fake” website and generate a password. Later the couple was also added as members of a Telegram group.

Couple was asked to invest in movie tickets

After the registration process, the couple was asked to watch movies and give ratings to them. However, before that the couple was asked to buy tickets of the movies as proof that they have watched the movies before giving ratings. Following the instructions, the couple logged into the website and purchased a bunch of movie tickets to watch around 28 movies across languages including Hollywood, Bollywood and South Indian Hindi dubbed movies.

After watching and rating the movies, the couple was supposed to get paid with the commission for rating a movie ranging between Rs 2500 and Rs 5,000. Additionally, the commission on movies was based on types of movies from Bollywood, Hollywood or South Indian movies.

According to the report, the couple has a well-educated background and the complainant’s wife also has a good command of English. Since the opportunity was offering money from the comfort of home the couple got interested in the opportunity. They even searched about the movie rating business online and after their research they found the opportunity genuine.

After all the contemplation, the couple decided to register and started rating movies. “To buy the first bunch of tickets, the frauds sent the victim a coupon of Rs 10,000 to win her confidence. Thereafter, including commission and everything around Rs 99,000 was deposited in her account within some time,” reports a police officer.

The victim earned around Rs 5 lakh of commission by buying tickets and rating the movies. However, when the woman went to withdraw the money, she was further asked to buy tickets of the same amount for more earnings. This way the couple was stuck in the cycle of the scam where they were asked to invest more to get their own money.

During this process, the couple ended up investing a total amount of 40 lakh in buying tickets. Later when the woman tried to withdraw Rs 40 lakh, the scammers told her she needed to pay a surcharge in advance to withdraw the money because it was a large amount. According to the police, the total amount paid was around Rs 70 lakh.

Scammers threatened the couple for money laundering

Afterwards, the criminals informed the woman that if she were to withdraw such a large sum of money, she could be charged with money laundering. To avoid this, they advised her to invest the entire amount in another scheme. The couple followed this suggestion and deposited Rs 1.12 crore. It was only after they deposited the money that they realised they had been scammed.

Thereafter, a case was registered at Jamnagar cyber crime police station and the police was able to trace the bank transactions and subsequently apprehended an individual in Surat named Smit Patoliya (21). According to P.P. Jha, the police inspector Patoliya had allowed the cybercriminals to use his bank account to deposit the funds and earned a commission in return. However, the authorities are still searching for the main perpetrator behind the fraudulent scheme.

On a safe note people shouldn’t fall for any false advertisement online. Cases of fake work-from-home opportunities are significantly increasing and people are ending up losing their lifetime savings. Scammers are creating too-good-to-be-true messages and websites to trick people and due to this people are not verifying such opportunities and fall into the trap.