Delhi: Sub-Inspector Ms. Anuplata (28), is posted the cybercrime police station in Northeast Delhi. The case that she was part of was a case like no other she had dealt with. The Police team arrested Bipin Kumar Jha (25) for cheating women registered on a matrimonial website. For this purpose Anuplata the investigating officer in the case created a profile on the same website, presenting herself as a potential match.
Police were acting on a cyber-fraud complaint filed by a woman, who said that the accused Jha presented himself as a Captain in the Army and approached her after seeing her profile on a matrimonial site. He asked her for around Rs 2 lakh, which she transferred. Later he began avoiding her according to police. He told her that he was posted in Jammu and Kashmir and needs to travel to Bihar for the treatment of his ill father.
Ms. Anuplata said “Some time had to be given for this because it was about building trust with somebody. It takes time for that. I had been speaking to him for a month. His phone would not usually remain switched on. This was also about convincing him that I am a regular person. Then he started calling from his phone,”.
The most challenging part about the investigation was that he was calling from many different remote locations, she said. “He was in Karnataka, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh. He was halting at a lot of places and it was practically impossible to cover all the houses in those areas. He wouldn’t even go home, so we couldn’t locate him that way. On October 19, the location of the phone that he was using was located in Jaipur and we immediately formed a team and left for a raid. He was caught from a restaurant there,” she said.
Ms. Anuplata said that he was moving from one place to another to avoid getting caught. The police have traced three to four other women that he had cheated of money, but there are likely to be more, she said, adding that he had cheated two other women of Rs.15,000/- and a third woman of around Rs.35,000/-.
She said that she would mostly talk to him on WhatsApp. “I told him that I saw his profile on the website and got his mobile number from there, my profile was that of a teacher,” she said.
She said, “It was a little strange to talk like this with somebody when personally we are not attached to them to give them time. But we know we’re doing this for the right purpose, and it is part of the job,” she added.
Anuplata, who has been serving in the Delhi Police for about three years and four months, said that she had heard about similar cases in the past with a matrimonial website, but this is the first time she was involved in cracking such a case.
According to police, the accused was influenced by stories of cyber fraud of a similar nature. He would find women on such websites contact them with offers for marriage and then talk with them. He would then ask them for money and disappear, police said.
