WhatsApp Group Started By Two Constables Helps Save More Than Rs 15 Crore

A WhatsApp and Telegram group called ‘Stop banking Fraud’ started by two constables from Gwalior four years ago has saved a minimum of Rs 15 crore since the day it was started.

In one of the cases that took place a few days ago, an elderly man was conned of Rs 75,000, which he had kept aside for his cancer treatment. The online fraudsters posing as bankers asked him to share his credit card details over the phone. Before the old man’s credit card could’ve been blocked, the conmen had already started spending.

The old man’s daughter approached the Juhu police in Mumbai who turned to the Crime branch. They, in turn, reached out to the WhatsApp group ‘Stop Banking Fraud.’

Responding to an official complaint in the group by the Crime Branch officer, a representative of the e-commerce site stopped the transaction on time and now all that was to be done was send an email for the money to be returned.

In cases of Cyber Crime, the foremost thing is stopping the money on time as the formalities can be done later and this group plays the role of bridging that gap.
Pushpendra Yadav and Radharaman Tripathi are the two constables who started this WhatsApp group four years ago after a man who has lost Rs 40,000 came to them but because of a power cut, they couldn’t send an email to the payment site to stop the transaction. So, Yadav and Tripathi called the representative on the landline for which the fraud details were asked, and by the next day Rs. 32000 was saved.

“Saving people’s hard-earned money from cyber criminals becomes a passion after a point,” says Yadav. “We have added officers from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to the group.”

The main motive of this group is to stop the transaction from being processed during the “golden hour” which is the first two hours of the fraud. The traditional method of doing this was for the police to send an email and then wait for the concerned person to verify the mail and stop the transfer.

The whole process wasn’t easy for Pushpendra and Radharam because people would keep leaving the group but they didn’t give up and as they started saving more money, more people joined in and now the WhatsApp group has 256 members while the Telegram group has 2,231 members, of which there are representatives of 75 service providers and 5 major payment companies.

“We thought that if we were able to save money in this way, we could help many more victims. With that thought, we started the WhatsApp group,” says Yadav.
“Recently, a man lost Rs 1.2 lakh, money he had borrowed to arrange for his daughter’s wedding. He came to us and said he would commit suicide if the wedding was called off. The money had been used to make transactions on an e-commerce site. We quickly contacted the company on the group and within 20 minutes, Rs 1 lakh was saved,” Yadav also said.