A 36-year-old woman from Andheri (East) was allegedly conned out of more than Rs 14 lakh by a cybercriminal who pretended to be an Indian Army lieutenant colonel on a dating site. After realising that she had been scammed, the woman reported the incident to the Mumbai cyber police, who registered an FIR and began a probe on Saturday.
The complainant, whose husband works as a private company manager, met the accused, who went by the name Alexander Reeves, on a popular dating platform on March 15, 2023. While introducing himself, Reeves told the woman that he was a lieutenant colonel stationed in Chenna and later shared his WhatsApp number with her, said the police.
According to the woman’s complaint, she frequently talked to Reeves over the phone for hours when she was alone. A few weeks later, the woman had a fight with her husband regarding some domestic issues. As a result, she started feeling mentally and emotionally disturbed and began trusting Reeves, as per a police source.
According to the FIR, Reeves once asked a woman for Rs 3 lakh because he faced a financial problem. The woman helped him, and he returned the money to her after a few days. As she began to trust him completely, Reeves took more money from her on multiple occasions for various purposes, but he never returned the money.
In October 2023, Reeves asked for Rs 3 lakh, but she refused to lend him the money this time. Reeves got angry and threatened to circulate some of her photos and reveal her “affair” to her husband. The woman was frightened and ended up giving him Rs 3 lakh. However, according to the police, she confided everything about Reeves to her husband.
The woman attempted to contact Reeves frequently, wanting him to return her money. In response, Reeves threatened to die by suicide and blamed her for it. However, when this tactic failed, he closed all his social media accounts, as per the FIR.
The complainant approached the police after obtaining details of the beneficiary’s bank account. The police registered a case against Reeves under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the IT Act for several offences, such as extortion, criminal conspiracy, cheating, impersonation, and forgery.
According to police sources, the beneficiary bank account is in the name of one Farhath Beghum in the Chennai branch of Indian Overseas Bank. The police are obtaining details of the beneficiary from the bank and trying to trace the fraudster using the registered details of his social media accounts and the dating app account.