Junior officials in her department received messages – sent from an unknown WhatsApp number using Devarajan’s photo – asking them to recharge her Amazon gift card. Devarajan is a special secretary with the department of women, children, disabled and senior citizens. The police said Prajapati’s number was “hacked” by fraudsters using an app and then used to text Kumar’s staff.Īnother case in Telangana was reported in June, involving another IAS officer called Divya Devarajan. The WhatsApp number used for this purpose was traced to one Mahendra Prajapati in Gujarat. “Our investigation is going on but we have not arrested anyone.” No one from Kumar’s staff fell for the scam. “The messages stated he was in an urgent meeting and can’t take calls, with a request to transfer money to an account,” Reddy said. Station house officer S Rajshekhar Reddy told Newslaundry the messages to Kumar’s staff came from an unknown WhatsApp number that used Kumar’s picture as a profile photo. Ashok Kumar, special chief secretary of urban development, filed a complaint with the Jubilee Hills police station in Hyderabad. In Telangana, for instance, an IAS officer tweeted in May that someone was posing as him on WhatsApp “asking for money from my staff/others”. Some states have also issued advisories warning the public about these scams. Victims are targeted by crooks posing as police officers, high-profile businessmen and politicians. Top cops in Kerala, Goa and Punjab told Newslaundry they estimate it to be around 50 cases across the country. These scams have spiked in India over the last 10 months, though there’s no clear data on the number. He’s not the only one to have fallen for it – there’s an entire world of WhatsApp scams, where hackers impersonate the rich and famous on the messaging platform to dupe friends, family members and colleagues. He asked his finance team to do the needful at once. It was a lot of money but Deshpande didn’t blink. The message asked him to transfer Rs 1.01 crore to certain bank accounts. On September 7, Satish Deshpande received a message that seemed, at the time, perfectly normal.ĭeshpande, a director at Pune’s Serum Institute of India, got a WhatsApp text from an unknown number but using the profile photo of his CEO, Adar Poonawala.
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