Vardhman Group chairman SP Oswal duped of Rs 7 crore, here's how it happened

The chairman of the Vardhman Group S.P. Oswal and Padma Bhushan awardee was recently cheated by a gang of cybercriminals who claimed to be CBI officers, and he lost Rs 7 crore to them. It occurred in two days in the last week of August.

The elaborate call was made when Oswal received a call from a man purporting to be a CBI officer working on a sensitive case related to Aadhaar. The fraudster accused him of being associated with a parcel with 58 fake passports and 16 ATM cards seized in Mumbai customs. Despite Oswal's firm denial of any wrongdoing, the criminals employed a chilling tactic: they faked an online Supreme Court hearing through Skype; they even hired someone to pretend to be Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud.

In a bid to press harder on Oswal, the scammers sent him an arrest warrant through the same application, WhatsApp, and threatened him to transfer Rs 7 crore to what they referred to as the ‘Secret Supervision Account’ (SSA). The psychological pressure did not let off; they told him to leave the Skype app open even when he slept; they said they were spying on him.

When he understood that he had been scammed, Oswal immediately lodged a complaint to the Ludhiana Police. The police promptly arrested two men identified as Atanoo Choudhary and Anand Kumar Choudhary from Guwahati while seizing Rs 5.25 crore. Seven other gang members have been named, and they are on the loose.

This is rather worrisome because it is the second major cyber fraud case that has been reported in the state of Punjab in a week. Another victim of a similar nature was local industrialist Rajnish Ahuja, who was duped out of Rs 1.01 crore.