Mumbai, Nov 5 (NIE): A 54-YEAR-OLD man has been cheated of Rs 1 lakh by alleged fraudsters, who posed as agents of an insurance company from where he had taken a policy around 15 years ago.
On October 27, the caller told Chembur resident Zankar Gadkar, a 58-year-old HR consultant, to pay Rs 1 lakh if he did not want his policy to lapse. The caller also told him that he would receive a lump sum maturity amount of Rs 2.1 lakh, following which Gadkar paid Rs 1 lakh.
When he received similar calls a few days later, Gadkar realised he had been cheated and approached the Govandi police station, where a case of cheating was registered against unidentified persons on November 1.
Police said that Gadkar had invested in the policy in 2003-04. He was to pay Rs 20,000 each for five years, following which he was to receive a lump sum amount after the maturity period. Gadkar stopped making the payments after three years, and did not hear from the insurance company, an officer said.
While he was on way to Pune on October 27, Gadkar received a call on his cellphone, where a man, identifying himself as Kunal, claimed to be calling on behalf of the insurance company. “He told me that I was to immediately pay of Rs 1 lakh if I did not want the policy to lapse. He said that in case I made the payment, I will get Rs 2.1 lakh in December. Since I was in a hurry and did not have the time to verify details, I asked my daughter to make the payment,” Gadkar said in his statement to the police.
After he returned to Mumbai, he sent a bank receipt of the payment he had made to Kunal’s mobile number on November 3.
In return, Kunal sent him a “receipt”, which claimed that the policy has been renewed. “The same day, Gadkar received two calls from people claiming to be from the insurance company asking him if he had made the payment. Suspicious, he approached the company, which said that no such receipt has been sent and that the call was not made from its side,” an officer said.
Gadkar then approached the police. “We are trying to get details of the account number where the payment was made. Usually, in such cases, fraudsters purchase data of insurance agency and use it to make such fraudulent calls,” the officer said.