Gone are the days when people used to go to markets manually to buy necessary products or goods, as it’s the time of online shopping and a number of individuals prefer it for obvious reasons; it’s hassle-free, time-saving and above all, you get various discounts as a result of tough competition. When something comes with so many benefits, why won’t people go for it? Agree?
However, few people try to take unnecessary advantages of these online stores and end up duping the firm for a huge sum by availing themselves of their return policy. We often stumble upon such incidents and the recent case is an addition to it.
Yes, you read it right! A woman in Bengaluru has been taken into custody as she allegedly deceived Amazon India for a whopping sum of Rs 69.91 lakh. She made a number of purchases online, returned their cheap duplicates and thus, claimed refunds worth lakhs. As far as the original products were concerned, she sold them on other shopping portals.
The accused has been identified as 32-yr Deepanwita Ghosh from West Bengal. She’s an engineering graduate and lives with husband in Horamavu’s Rajanna Layout in Agara. She was a skilled online shopper and hence, made up mind of cheating the e-commerce giant.
Denu T Nair, a representative of the firm, filed an FIR against the woman on 18th April in which he said that fake names had been used by Deepanwita for buying 104 items, such as TVs, SLR cameras, mobiles, etc. She misused C-return, customer return system of the company, and demanded refunds, as she used to send the return request within 24 hours after purchasing items. Here’s what DCP, Bengaluru east, Ajay Hilori, stated,
“Every time, the delivery address was different from the C-return address, which was often in other cities. After getting a repayment from Amazon to her bank account, Deepanwita would replace the product with a substandard one and hand over the package to the delivery person.”
As per DCP, she was constantly cheating the company for almost a year because the return policy had no procedure to open and examine the item at the time of returning. Amazon carried out an internal inquiry on finding that a number of products which had been returned to them were actually inexpensive duplicates and not the real ones.
It was disclosed in the police inquiry that she used to function as a seller on some other shopping portal using a false name Rajarshi96. When she got orders of advanced electronic products there, she used to order the same item on Amazon and got the good shipped directly to consumers by Amazon. As per an official who is probing the case,
“Once her customer received the product and Ghosh received cash for it, she would initiate a C-return with Amazon and receive a refund by returning lookalikes.”
She was finally detained by a team of Hennur cops in the end of April and landed in jail for online fraud and cheating. As per a source, Amazon is to bring about changes in its return policy after the shocking incident. Here’s what an Amazon warehouse executive said,
“Now, products like cellphones are received from customers only after verifying IMEI numbers and other items following corroboration of unique product codes apart from a thorough inspection. An acknowledgement with the customer’s signature is also obtained at the time of return of expensive items.”
WTF!
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