Siliguri: An 80-year-old man from Sanhati More, Siliguri, fell victim to a cyber fraud, losing Rs 37 lakh to scammers posing as police officers from Jammu and Kashmir.
The victim, identified as Manoj Mohan Sen Sharma, reported that on August 4 he received a call from an unknown number.
The caller introduced himself as a J&K police officer and claimed that an arrest warrant had been issued against him for alleged links to Pakistan and involvement in the Pahalgam attack in Kashmir. He was told he would be “digitally arrested” or must report to a police station within 24 hours.
The scammers started calling him repeatedly. They conducted a video call, appearing in police uniforms and showing what looked like a police station office. The scammers sent him a forged arrest warrant and related documents, pressuring him to settle the case. Fearing legal trouble, Sharma transferred Rs 37 lakh to a bank account provided by the callers, which was registered under the name of a tour and travel company. When he later realised he had been duped, Sharma lodged a complaint with the Cyber Police Station in Siliguri.
In another case, the Siliguri Central Goods and Services Tax (CGST) officials have arrested a Kolkata-based businessman Shashi Kumar Choudhury on charges of defrauding the government of Rs 10 crore in taxes.
Choudhury was operating a betel nut business in Siliguri, Dhupguri, Falakata and parts of Assam. He created forged documents for his operations. Over the past one-and-a-half years, he has been accused of evading taxes on 164 truckloads of betel nuts. Ratan Banik, Public Prosecutor for the CGST, stated that there was no bank transaction related to his betel nut trade, no data of trucks carrying betel nuts was found in toll plaza records.
However, he fraudulently availed Rs 10 crore in input tax credit by submitting fake documents. He has been sent for 14 days of judicial custody.