KOLKATA: After senior state bureaucrats and top police officers, Mewat cyber gangs have targetted city educationists with a similar modus operandi — creating fake Facebook pages in their names and seeking money from those in their friend lists. Police said these gangs are mainly operating from Bharatpur and Alwar.
In the past week, prominent educationalists Pabitra Sarkar and Debnarayan Sarkar have lodged complaints against fake Facebook pages that the accused had created in their names and asked for Rs 10,000 as help from their social media friends.
In the first case, an unidentified person attempted to cheat people by using a fake Facebook account of Pabitra Sarkar by sending messages to his friends and asking for money. His friends suspected when they found the word “urgent” was misspelt as “argent’ and informed him about the matter. “On September 9, one of my JU students asked me whether I had opened a new FB account. I checked and found the fraud. My friends, who received the message for money, complained about the fake profile. By the time I clicked on the fake account link shared by my students, it was deactivated,” Pabitra said.
Debnarayan had received the news of fraud around midnight on September 5. “I got to know that the accused had sought Rs 10,000 from a lawyer, Gopal Chandra Mondal. I was shocked since I was not active on FB. I had opened an account five years ago but it remains dormant. One of friends said that the lawyer had called him to find why I needed such a paltry amount. When I called him up, he said that he was having a doubt from the beginning. I went to the cyber crime cell at Lalbazar with him and lodged a complaint,” said Debnarayan.
