Three people were taken into custody in Odisha’s capital city Bhubaneswar for allegedly defrauding a private company of Rs 5 lakh, a police officer said on Monday.
The arrested suspects have been identified as Jitendra Kumar Khuntia (33), Rajesh Kumar Jena (34), and Purushottam Behera (35), all residents hailing from Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, the officer noted.
The accused were arrested on Sunday and produced before a local court on Monday, according to police.
The fraud unfolded on August 14 when the suspects impersonated the managing director of a Bhubaneswar-based event management company and sent fraudulent payment instructions to a senior company executive of the company through WhatsApp.
Believing the instructions to be authentic, the senior staff transferred Rs 5 lakh from the company’s bank account into a beneficiary account. However, when subsequent payment requests totalling Rs 10 lakh came from the same phone number, suspicions were raised, leading company staff to verify that the managing director had never sanctioned the transactions and that they were targeted by fraudsters, the officer explained.
Following a complaint lodged by the company’s director at the local Cybercrime police station on August 17, a detailed investigation initiated and led to the arrest of the three men, the officer added.
