Gurgaon: A retired school teacher was cheated out of over Rs 4 lakh after fraudsters pretending to help her book domestic help services online allegedly installed a suspicious application on her mobile phone. The 75-year-old resident of Sushant Lok Phase 1 told cops the cons stole money from her accounts across three different banks.The complainant said that she contacted the cons through a fake helpline number she found online while trying to book domestic help services. The man who spoke to her told her to switch to a chat platform and promised to guide her through the booking process.The caller told her she would need to deposit Rs 10 as a booking amount, assuring her that the money would later be refunded. He asked her to use a UPI platform for the payment. When she refused to disclose the PIN and instead entered it herself, however, the app repeatedly displayed the PIN as incorrect, making her suspicious.“I disconnected the call immediately,” she said.The next morning, she noticed something unusual with her mobile phone.“When I woke up on April 23, my phone battery had drained to 1%. Even when I was not using the phone, the battery kept draining rapidly,” she said.Concerned, her son advised her to investigate the issue. With the help of an acquaintance, she discovered that an unidentified application had been installed on the phone. “Every time we tried uninstalling the app, the phone would automatically shut down,” she said.A few days later, she realised she was no longer receiving banking SMS alerts on her phone. She opened her mobile banking application, where a security warning appeared on the screen. She later visited a mobile repair shop seeking technical assistance, but the issue could not be fixed.On April 29, she finally received a message alerting her that Rs 44,000 had been transferred from her account to a person identified as Ritesh Kumar. Further checks revealed that fraudsters siphoned off approximately Rs 4.16 lakh from her accounts across three different banks. She subsequently filed a complaint at Cyber East police station on May 4.“We are investigating the matter and a case will be registered after the transactions surface from the banks,” an officer said.
