Noida: A 73-year-old man was allegedly cheated of Rs 2.2 crore in a share market trading scam in Sector 21 between June 15 and July 21. After transferring the money, the man received no returns. He visited the trading app’s headquarters in Mumbai on July 27, where he learnt he had fallen victim to a fraud.The retired govt employee filed a complaint at the cybercrime police station on Wednesday. He told the cops that he received a form for opening a trading account on WhatsApp on June 10. It bore a logo of Upstox Securities, one of India’s largest brokerage firms headquartered in Mumbai. Believing it to be genuine, he filled out the form.Four days later, people posing as representatives of the firm informed him through WhatsApp that his account opening application had been approved. They asked him to submit copies of Aadhaar Card, PAN Card and KYC verification. “I was then asked to install a trading application named UP.Xpro,” he wrote in the complaint. “The persons operating the platform said I could earn profits through buying stocks at the upper circuit and selling them the next day for around 5% profit and participating in block deals at discounted prices.”Between June 15 and July 21, the man invested Rs 2.2 crore in different IPOs through the app.To gain his confidence, the cybercriminals showed that his investment in Parmax Pharma Limited had given him good profits.From Versova in Mumbai to Imphal, the customer support ‘executives’ kept asking him to deposit funds into various bank accounts located across the country.When the profits reflected on the app went over Rs 6 crore, the man requested to withdraw Rs 1.85 crore, but the ‘executives’ kept on demanding more money on various pretexts like service fees or capital gains taxes. He had a hunch that this was a fraud. “To verify it, I visited Upstox Securities at Dadar (W), Mumbai on July 27 and learnt that it was a scam and they have received many such complaints,” he told the cops.The SHO of the cybercrime police station, Vijay Rana, said that based on his complaint, an FIR has been registered against an unknown person under sections 318(4) (cheating) and 319(2) (cheating by personation) of BNS and the IT Act.
