It is common to hear of innocent individuals being scammed of their money through fake links or emails that look convincingly real.
But it is unheard of for a major company to be scammed of lakhs. This is what happened to Amazon, which was deceived of a whopping Rs 20 lakh by a 22-year-old.
The scam was unearthed by Bengaluru police, along with local representatives of a unit of the e-commerce giant Amazon.
It involved fake returns of expensive gadgets like iPhones purchased on the website in India.
Amazon Transportation Services Private Limited officials first initiated investigations over losses the company suffered on account of refunds on these gadgets worth crores that showed up on systems falsely as returned.
Amazon's investigation in Bengaluru shows that, between May 15 and 17 this year, an engineering student named Chirag Gupta purchased four Apple iPhones between using credit card and UPI.
It was found that all four devices were delivered to the customer from its delivery centre in Peenya in north Bengaluru and subsequently shown as returned to Amazon through the online customer application. Post that, refunds were also made. However, it was realised that the phones were never actually returned to the Amazon Transportation Services unit.
The company sent a representative to determine why the customer returned the phones.
That is when the truth unfolded - Gupta informed that he had initiated the transactions at the instance of a friend from Madhya Pradesh who said that he had found a way to obtain refunds on Amazon while keeping devices that were bought online.
Investigations revealed that Chirag was offered a commission for buying expensive gadgets on Amazon by a suspect who communicated with him over the Telegram app, as reported by Indian Express.
The devices were then sold by the suspect at a profit that was received in cryptocurrency.
The mastermind behind this scam is reportedly a former Amazon employee who had access codes to manipulate product return data.
Bengaluru North police said in an official statement: "Based on the investigations of the arrested person and the data from Amazon, gadgets worth Rs 20.34 lakh, including 16 iPhones, two Macbooks, a pair of AirPods, one Vivo phone, one desktop, one gaming laptop, and Rs 2.5 lakh in cash has been seized."
Further, the police has also frozen Rs 30 lakh in multiple bank accounts linked to the accused.
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