Bengaluru: The city police have come to suspect a huge racket involving the selling of pilfered articles through online platforms, after a mobile phone was put up for sale on the internet just three hours after it was stolen, according to a report by TOI.
It all started when a PSU employee realised that he no longer had his OnePlus3 smartphone with him after boarding a BMTC bus in the HSR Layout on September 24 morning.
Speaking to TOI, the victim of the theft said, “I requested a fellow passenger to dial my number and discovered that the miscreants had removed the sim card. The voice message said the incoming call facility for the number had been barred. I reached the HSR Layout police station and filed an FIR.”
The next morning, when he went online to look for mobiles to purchase, he stumbled upon an e-commerce platform where, among pictures of used cellphones, he noticed the panel of a particular phone. “I instantly knew it was mine. I recognised it from the patches on the panel,” he said.
The victim added that, when he searched for more details about the phone, he found that the picture was uploaded just before midnight, indicating that the miscreants had posted it within hours of the theft. “The seller, identified as Sushil Kumar Singh from Delhi, quoted a price of Rs 8,000 and said it was negotiable,” he said.
“I got in touch with him through the chat box provided on the platform. I told him I’d pay Rs 3,000 for the handset, while Singh asked for Rs 7,000. I asked him for more details like his contact number and address, after which he went incommunicado,” he said.
When the victim tried contacting the platform’s customer care service, they refused to provide any of the seller’s details.
By the time, the victim approached the HSR Layout police to seek their intervention in the case, the phone had been reportedly sold off and the advertisement was no longer viewable.
