Man loses Rs6.6mn in work-from-home hotel rating scam

A man was out of Rs6.67 million after he fell victim to a work-from-home fake hotel rating scam that promised monetary rewards.

The man hailing from India’s Greater Noida, filed a police complaint alleging that the cyber fraud cost him INR2 million (translating to PKR6.67 million), an Indian media outlet reported.

In his complaint to the police, the victim identified as Sandeep Kumar, alleged that he was informed through a WhatsApp text message about the work-from-home job.

The job required him to rate hotels on Google Maps and promised him money in return.

After responding to the message, the complainant was added to a 100-member Telegram group and he began performing the rating tasks on Google Maps.

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Later, he started to get involved in the investment activities through the WhatsApp group.

“I started rating the hotels etc. With these tasks, there were some investment tasks too where I invested INR50,000 first, but I couldn’t withdraw the money from the website,” Kumar claimed.

Sandeep Kumar ended up investing over INR2million after he was asked to pay additional INR500,000 as tax to withdraw the money he had invested earlier.

After realising that he had been duped in the work-from-home hotel rating scam, he froze his bank account.

In his complaint, Kumar claimed of receiving death threats from the alleged scammers via Telegram and phone calls.

“I am getting death threats from these people on Telegram as well as on calls to defreeze the accounts,” he said.