A 30-year-old chartered accountant (CA) was cheated to the tune of ₹2.85 lakhs by unknown frauds who posed as executives of a multinational company offering her a part time job. The accused initially asked her to follow certain celebrities and even paid her money for that and later started asking her to complete various tasks.

The N M Joshi Marg police registered a case against unknown accused based on the complaint lodged by Afreen Shaikh, 30, a chartered accountant by profession and a resident of Elphinstone Road. She told the police that a woman had approached her on November 25 posing as executive of a multinational company.

The woman told Shaikh that she had got her profile from a leading job portal and offered her part-time work. “The woman asked her to follow certain celebrities on social media and told her she will get commission for the same. Accordingly, she even got commission of ₹150 and one more sum of ₹50.

Later, the caller asked the CA to start trading and join their Telegram channel. On the channel, initially she was asked to trade and invest ₹13,000, she immediately got ₹17,900 in her bank account which increased her confidence,” said a police officer from NM Joshi Marg police station.

Later she was asked to complete four tasks by investing ₹5,000, ₹30,000, ₹1,00,000 and later ₹1,50,000.

“When she completed the tasks and started demanding her money, they told her those were group tasks and the other two group members had invested ₹3,00,000 in the fourth task so she should also accordingly invest equal amount in it to get her money back,” said the police officer.

As Shaikh was not keen to investing more money, she tried contacting the other two members of her group but received no reply. When she demanded her money back, she received no reply and therefore suspected something was wrong and approached us, said a police officer.

A has been registered under sections 419 (punishment for cheating by personation) and 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 66C (identity theft) and 66D (cheating by personation using computer resources) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 said the police officer.