Bengaluru techie loses ₹3.67 lakh in Telegram job scam

Bengaluru

A 28-year-old private firm employee from Horamavu has filed a complaint after falling victim to a sophisticated online scam that originated on Telegram, costing him a total of ₹3.67 lakh. FIR is registered at East CEN police station.

The victim, Rishabh Kedia, was first contacted on May 15 via WhatsApp by a woman who introduced herself as an office employee from Mumbai. She promised earnings for performing simple review-based tasks. After completing the initial assignments, he was directed to a Telegram ID (@frontdesk_sanika_0001) of someone identifying as “Receptionist Sanika Yadav.”

Rishabh was soon added to a Telegram group named “167-CBOE TASK GROUP,” where similar task-based earning schemes were being promoted. He began receiving small amounts for initial tasks. However, the scam escalated when he was instructed to join another group, “ADVANCE TASK GROUP 5000,” run by a person posing as a mentor named Shivansh.

Rishabh was lured into investing ₹19,200 in a so-called “profit plan,” with the promise of receiving ₹28,992 in return. Following a series of deliberately engineered errors, the scammers kept demanding additional money to “rectify” issues and unlock previously “earned” funds.

Believing he could recover his investments, Rishabh ended up transferring ₹9,00,952 from his and his friends’ bank accounts. The final straw came on May 20, when he was asked to pay another ₹2.1 lakh to resolve a fake tax issue. Realizing the deception, he stopped communication and approached the Cyber Crime Cell.

In his FIR, Rishabh accused unknown individuals of identity theft and financial fraud. He has urged authorities to trace the transaction trail, recover his funds, and guide him through the process of refund retrieval, if any recovery is made.

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