New Cyber Fraud Exposed: How Chennai Woman Evaded 'Drug Smuggling' Scam

After two Gurugram residents were duped of nearly Rs 2 crore by cyberfraudsters, a marketing professional from Chennai on Tuesday said she received a similar scam call claiming her Aadhaar number was used to send drugs to Thailand. 

In a series of posts on X, Lavanya Mohan detailed the conversation she had with a man impersonating a customer care executive from delivery service FedEx claiming drugs were being transported internationally using her ID. 

"Two weeks ago, there was news of one man from Gurgaon losing 56 Lakhs to a scammer and another, 1.3 Crores. I got the same call today. A customer care exec from FedEx will call you and say that your Aadhar card is being misused to send packages with drugs to Thailand," she wrote.

To make it sound like a legitimate concern, the caller also provided her with fake package details, an FIR number and also their own fake employee ID. The caller then offered to connect her to a customs official to solve the issue.

"Ma'am, if you don't go ahead with the complaint, your Aadhar will continue to be misused so let me connect you right away with the cyber crime branch" Threatening consequences + urgency = scam," she wrote.

Ms Mohan said the caller even warned her of "rising scams" and offered to help her with the issue urgently by contacting the police.  

"Whats worrying is the level of details he had to provide me. The modus operandi is they connect you to the police who then claim that your ID is linked to the underworld. People are losing their hard-earned money and they can't be blamed because these scams are growing more sophisticated," she said.

Warning against falling for such "sophisticated" threats, Ms Mohan said it was highly unlikely that a delivery service would contact you over a serious issue like this, adding that if your ID was being misused the police are likely visit you personally to inform you.

"Anyway, I told the scammer I'd wait for the police to contact me and cut the call," she said.

In a statement on Wednesday, delivery service FedEx clarified that it does not seek information about shipped good through calls to customers unless a call is requested by the costumer.  "If any individual receives any suspicious phone calls or messages, they are advised not to provide their personal information. Instead, they should immediately contact the local law enforcement authorities within the vicinity or report to the cybercrime department of the government of India," it said.

Similar cyber scams that use highly-detailed information to appear genuine have been reported very frequently across the country over the past few months.

In February, Debraj Mitra, a resident of Gurugram, received a similar call informing him that a package containing passports, credit cards, drugs and laptops linked to the "Mumbai underworld" were sent from Taiwan to Mumbai using his Aadhaar details. 

Callers, posing as a Mumbai Crime Branch officials, contacted him through Skype and made him transfer all his funds into a bank account for "monitoring". Before he realised he was being scammed, Mr Mitra had transferred a total sum of ₹ 56,70,000 to the bank account shared by the fraudsters.