Bhopal: An engineer of a private telecom company here had been put under digital arrest for around six hours by the cyber fraudsters before being rescued by the police.
Pramod Kumar’s ordeal began on Tuesday evening after he received a call from an unknown number threatening his arrest for the misuse of the SIM cards issued on his Aadhaar card and ended on Wednesday morning when police broke into his house to free him from the digital arrest by the fraudsters.
This was the second such incident in Bhopal in the last one week.
The telecom engineer had remained incommunicado for nearly 24 hours on Tuesday for his family members and company colleagues raising suspicion among his friends, according to the additional commissioner of police here Sailendra Singh Chouhan.
According to the police, one fake police officer had called Mr Kumar at around 6.30 pm on Tuesday from an unknown number to inform him that his Aadhaar card was misused to issue SIM cards, which is a serious offence and will land him in jail.
The fake police officer later forced him to switch over to video call and started grilling him to put him under mental pressure.
In the video call, the fake police officer was seen with other such cops and a lawyer in ‘what appeared to be a police station’, the police quoted Mr Kumar as saying.
They tried to convince him that it was a serious offence and he had to pay Rs 3.5 lakh to avoid arrest.
He was asked by the scammers not to inform anybody about it.
The fraudsters asked his wife to switch off her phone, according to the police.
Mr Kumar did not respond to the phone calls from his colleagues and friends during the period out of fear.
His colleagues on Wednesday morning tipped off the police about it fearing that something might have gone wrong with him.
Later, the police broke into his house and rescued him from the fraudsters.
Mr Kumar said that he was about to transfer Rs four lakh to the fraudsters when the police intervened and saved him from the scammers.
In a similar incident, a Dubai-based entrepreneur was rescued by the police from digital arrest by the scammers in his house here on November seven.