A gang poses as sellers and cheats Flipkart off Rs 17 lakh. Flipkart has filed a complaint with Koramangala police on Wednesday. According to police sources, the fraud was planned from early 2017 with the suspects registering themselves as sellers for trading in several products, including electronic items.
The gang studied Flipkart’s Seller Protection Fund (SPF) scheme according to which Flipkart have to refund the amount to the seller if the product goes missing or gets damaged in the transit when the customer is returning the product.
Flipkart complained that the gang registered themselves with different seller accounts and started shipping products to the customers using Flipkart’s logistics services. Whenever the customers returned the damaged product back to the seller they didn’t inform Flipkart about that and they received refunds for those products as per SPF scheme. Both the customers and the sellers asked for refunds for the damaged or wrong products.
When Flipkart came to know about this they started investigating they issue soon found that both the sellers and the buyers were the same party operating from different addresses. It was planned that the customer will return the product to the seller and both will claim the refund for it.
According to Flipkart, this gang collected Rs. 17 lakh by getting refunds from several cases. Before filing this complaint a Flipkart officer visited Siliguri in May 2017 to know more about this case and found a man and woman registered as sellers who were involved in this act of cheating. He also met a man in Bengal who had admitted to such acts and had deposited Rs 10 lakh and submitted a letter of apology to Flipkart.
The elder brother of this man claimed that they had only cheated with Rs. 5 lakh and also threatened Flipkart to return the remaining 5 lakh. While providing all these details the Flipkart’s official refused to reveal any other information on this case.
