Diginal victims were clandestine about fraudulent scheme

HYDERABAD: Among the over 600 victims that were duped by Diginal India Pvt. Ltd, more than 10 per cent of them are working for a reputed hospital chain in the city.

Police said the other victims are either family members or distant relatives of these employees. Normally, such fraudulent investment schemes are spread to a large number of people in order to maximise profits, but the victims only shared the details of the investment scheme with family members.

"They told us how we can make up for the financial hardships incurred due to the pandemic, and we joined them," one of the victims who worked for the hospital told the police. "The returns were paid promptly in the beginning, but gradually slowed," he said, adding that he had invested Rs 1 lakh in the firm.

Deepak Sharma, CEO of Diginal India Pvt. Ltd., and his associates Syed Sameer Uddin, Ashish Kumar, and Amit Sharma were recently arrested for defrauding people of Rs 15 crore by offering work-from-home scheme. The fraudulent job scheme entailed digitising and scanning old novels and books, then converting them to PDF files. The accused offered each investor Rs 50,000 in exchange for scanning 10,000 pages in 25 days.