In the world where, with advent of technology, technology enabled scams are also rampant, a new shocking incident has come to light. This time the culprit is Ahmedabad based 21 year old boy duped around 25000 people from 40 countries. The scale of this fraud amounts whooping 5Crore. The list of his targeted countries includes the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Australia and Ghana.
A boy of humble origins
The accused, Harshwardhan Parmar, belongs to humble background, where his father is a daily wage laborer and mother is a midwife in a municipal hospital. The family belongs to Isanpur region of Ahmedabad. By education qualifications the boy has passed just 12th Std. After getting to know the scrupulous ways of earning money easily he started to live a very lavish lifestyle. It is the same lavish lifestyle along with some naiveness seems to have bought him the attention of law and order reinforcing agencies.
A very sophisticated network unearthed
Harshwardhan, came in contact with Pakistani Citizen, Zia Mustafa, who was his guru in the card fraud. He also used to get help of Russian Hackers for getting details of credit and debit card details of foreign national.
As quoted by Times of India, a senior officer investigating the case said, “The accused paid Russian hackers anywhere between $10 to $100 depending on the amount in the cardholder’s account and in which country the bank was situated.
The team primarily targeted the nationals from countries where no OTP is sent for verification of online transactions. Card details, once received were being used for online shopping. The goods when delivered were being exchanged for cash at local level. Within the span of 100 days, Parmar seems to have robbed 25000 foreign nationals across 40 countries.
Cyber Cell of Ahmedabad was recently warranted about someone bypassing the traditional internet services to access the dark web, through which the shenanigans were being orchestrated. The Police laid the trap and snatched Parmar when he ordered 30 refrigerators near his house.
This story of Harshwardhan Parmar brings us the dark side of the web. At the same time, it alerts us for the safety regarding our own monetary online transactions. We suggest our reader to educate themselves more on safety measures for transacting online.
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