With cyber crime cases and impersonation scams witnessing a sharp rise across cities, actor Ankiita Bhargava recently found herself dealing with a frightening situation at her parents’ home when two men posing as Crime Branch officers allegedly attempted to scam them. “They were impersonating Crime Branch officials from Ahmedabad and they had their homework well done. It was scary honestly,” Ankiita tells us.
Recalling the incident, she shares, “The last person who stayed next to my parents’ house had shifted to another building last year and knew them quite well. Now there’s a single girl with a dog staying next door. These scammers first went to her house, gave her all the jargon and made her sign a handwritten paper in Gujarati.” According to Ankiita, the neighbour signed the document because she either felt intimidated or assumed it was harmless.
Ankiita happened to arrive at her parents’ home just as the men were speaking to her father and trying to get him to sign some papers. “They told us our ex-neighbour was involved in a fraud in Ahmedabad and they were looking for him. They asked if we knew where he was and then told my father to sign a written statement saying we had nothing to do with it,” she says.
However, Ankiita immediately grew suspicious after noticing the statement was entirely in Gujarati. “I told them we neither read nor understand Gujarati. He tried explaining the contents verbally in Hindi, but I asked him, ‘How do I know what you’re saying and what’s written is the same thing?’”
To verify the contents, Ankiita even sent a picture of the document to her mother-in-law and tried decoding it through ChatGPT, but they could only identify a few names and their flat number. Realising something was off, she refused to let her father sign the paper. “I told him, ‘Please write it in Hindi or English and then we’ll sign.’ He said he didn’t know those languages. That’s when I told them nobody was signing anything unless we understood what was written,” she recalls.
Soon after, their neighbour informed them that she had already signed the paper and later discovered similar scam cases online. Following legal advice, she approached Oshiwara Police Station and filed a complaint. “When we spoke to the police, they checked the records and confirmed that nobody from Crime Branch Ahmedabad had come to Mumbai for any such investigation,” Ankiita shares.
Though her family avoided signing the document, the incident left them shaken, especially after learning how such scams unfold. “Apparently, this is just act one. They get people to sign a random paper and later add more details to it. Then they threaten you saying you’ve signed an undertaking and now you owe money or the Crime Branch will come after you,” she explains.
The incident has also heightened her concern for elderly parents who are often soft targets for such frauds. “My father later told me he would have signed it because they were only asking him to confirm he didn’t know where the neighbour was. It didn’t feel like a big deal to him,” she says, adding, “Our parents still trust people very easily. It’s sad, but they really have to stay careful now.”