LAHORE: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has unearthed another online fraud in which hundreds of people were fleeced on the promise of getting jobs.

The FIA received a complaint that a fake company was advertising online and also in newspapers promising to provide ‘online job’ to those getting registered with it against Rs4,000.

“We raided the company office in Jauhar Town in Lahore and arrested its owner Muhammad Ahmed. A laptop, two hard disks, five cell phones, 65 slips of amount received and deposited in different banks and cheque books were recovered from him,” FIA’s Lahore Cyber Crime head Shahid Hasan told Dawn on Sunday.

Talking about the modus operandi, Mr Hasan said the suspect would advertise about online jobs/work at different newspapers and his own website www.bmsonlinework.com. “After receiving registration fee (US$40) the suspect created Internet accounts and logins of the customer through different websites -- www.2capture.com, www.freelancer.com and www.upwork.com -- and the customer was asked to start work. When the customer completes a work assignment he was asked to get salary through www.perfectmoney.com but he ends up receiving no money/salary,” he said.

Mr Hasan said as the login ID and password were in the knowledge of the suspect he used to blackmail his customers to extort more money from them. “This way the suspect extorted money from hundreds of people,” he said.

The digital media recovered from the suspect has been handed over to the forensic experts.

The FIA official said the people should be aware of such tactics of fraudsters on the Internet and must not fall prey to their trap.

Earlier, the FIA had busted a gang involved in online fraud of Rs2bn. At least 5,000 people had been affected from that fraud.

The gang of 10 set up a website - e2click.com - through which it asked people to get registered with them against certain amount and earn profits by posting and clicking advertisement (on this webiste).

The owners of e2click.com used to win confidence of their clients by giving away a few thousands rupees in profit and once they started believing that the website was genuine they invested more.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2016