Another 'Click Farm' fraud case, man duped of Rs 22 lakh

Lucknow, May 16 (IANS) In yet another case of 'click farm' fraud, a man has been duped of Rs 22 lakh.

According to the FIR lodged with the Cyber Police station in Gomti Nagar, the victim got a message offering him money in lieu of simple task work, on his WhatsApp. Soon after, he was added to a Telegram group.

The work involved clicking 'likes' on sites and links. He had a talk with one of the staff of the company offering the job and was given Rs 3,000 as profit for the work.

"In order to win the confidence of the victim, the thugs even gave him a return as a salary of Rs 48,450 and then they asked him to invest money from an amount of Rs 4.84 lakh.

He was also asked to deposit over Rs 2 lakh as tax and he paid the money in the hope of getting a heavy refund. But the miscreant kept offering bait to him and he finally fell for it by paying over Rs 3 lakh, Rs 5 lakh and Rs 6 lakh for doing different tasks as precondition of getting the invested sum back," said the police.

However, the miscreants stopped taking phone calls from him after fleecing over Rs 22 lakh from the victim in the case. Left with no option, the victim lodged a case with the Cyber police stating that the miscreants defrauded him by impersonating themselves as staff of a registered company.

"I had checked the details of the company before accepting the online job offer," he said.

SHO, Muslim Khan, said that an FIR under the charges of IPC 419 (Punishment for cheating by personation), IPC 420 (cheating) and other section had been lodged and investigations were underway.

A cyber expert said that 'click farm', is a scam in which a large group of low paid workers are hired to click on paid advertising links for the click. The workers click the links, surf the target website for a period and in turn get paid.

However, in the garb of providing jobs, cyber scammers are cheating and duping innocents on the pretext of providing them money.

"So far, nobody has been arrested in connection with such a fraud, hence it is not easy to claim whose handiwork it could be, but the gang seemed to have spread across India," he said.