Woman loses more than Rs 8 lakh after falling for a new YouTube scam, here is what happened

Have you received a work from home opportunity message on WhatsApp? Do not fall for it or you will end up losing all your money.

SUMMARY

The woman was aksed to subscribe to YouTube channels to earn extra money.
She ended up losing Rs 8.20 lakh to scammers and instead of getting profit.
The YouTube scam is going viral and scammers are reaching out to people though WhatsApp and Telegram.

A woman from Karnataka recently lost more than Rs 8 lakh after falling for a work-from-home opportunity. The scammers reached out to the victim on WhatsApp and offered her a part-time job which required her to subscribe to a YouTube channel to get a commission.

According to the case reported by PTI, the victim, Saritha S, a native of Karnataka who lives in the Sector 43 area filed a case of online fraud. She revealed that she received a message regarding an opportunity to earn money through work from home on WhatsApp.

The person who contacted the victim identified themselves as Yusfat, an assistant manager in the HR department of Aidnet global marketing company. He further shared more details about the work-from-home opportunity and revealed that the victim can earn extra money by just subscribing to a YouTube channel. The offer further mentioned that the company will pay Rs 50 for each YouTube subscription.

In order to learn more about the opportunity, the victim responded to the sender's message. The sender then provided her with some links to YouTube channels to subscribe to. Following the instructions, the victim subscribed to two of the YouTube channels and was later contacted by another person who asked the victim to share her Telegram ID.

"I subscribed to two channels; I got a call from the receptionist Laila who asked me to share my Telegram ID. When I messaged Laila on Telegram, she subscribed to some other channels and paid ? 150. Then I was added to a Telegram group having 180 members. All these people were performing some task," the victim said in her report.

Later, the assistant, Lalia asked to complete more tasks which were assigned to her through Telegram in order to earn more profit. While the report does not further mention how the victim ended up losing money, it has been revealed that the complaint was cheated for Rs 8.20 lakh via those assigned tasks.

Later, the victim filed her complaint, and an FIR was registered against the unknown accused under sections 419 (cheating by impersonation) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) at cybercrime, Manesar police station on Wednesday.

Notably, this is not the first case of someone losing money after falling for a work-from-home opportunity. In the last few weeks, there have been several cases of online fraud where scammers duped victims out of lakhs of rupees by luring them into an opportunity to earn more money.

In one case, a couple from Gujarat lost more than Rs 1 crore after falling for an opportunity that required them to watch movies and earn a profit by rating them. In another instance of fraud, a woman from Gurugram lost around Rs 8 lakh after falling for a movie review scam.

These two cases of movie reviews and YouTube subscriptions follow a similar pattern. Scammers reach out to victims and offer them work-from-home opportunities in exchange for profit. Later, they ask the victim to invest money or send a malicious payment link through which they steal the victim's bank account or card details to empty their bank accounts.

Source: bussinesstoday.in