Ex-employee of e-wallet firm booked for embezzling ₹48 lakh in Gurugram

A former employee of a major mobile phone payment and e-wallet firm was booked in Gurugram for embezzling more than ₹48 lakh from the company’s e-wallet account, police said on Thursday.

The firm learnt about the embezzlement on July 9 when it was unable to make any transaction to deposit cashbacks and incentives into the e-wallets of thousands of users as no balance was left in the company’s account.

The firm conducted an internal inquiry and realised that one of their former employees, who left the job on May 31, had accessed their automated system with the credentials of another employee to make several illegal transactions.

“The firm will be asked to provide documents and evidence based on which action will be taken against the suspect soon,” said Sandeep Kumar, public relations officer of the Gurugram police.

Based on a complaint from Rajat Goel, an authorised representative of the firm, a first information report was registered against the suspect at the Sector 53 police station on Wednesday under sections 407 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (cheating) and 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) of the Indian Penal Code.

The suspect had joined the firm’s office on Golf Course Road in Sector 53 on April 17 last year, police said. No one in the office suspected him because he had figured out a loophole in the transaction system that no employee could see what data was being uploaded by another colleague, police said.

A senior police officer, quoting the company’s allegations, said that the suspect used this loophole to upload order forms with data of fictitious merchants and their transactions in the automated system to credit incentives into e-wallets created in their names.

“He had created 15 e-wallets in which ₹48 lakh were transacted over several months. One of these e-wallets was in his name and another was in his father’s name. The embezzled amount may increase further according to the firm,” said the senior police officer.

The suspect had stopped coming to office from March 10 citing medical exigencies and was working from home following which he was asked to resign on May 8 by firm executives, police said.

Police said that it was yet not clear how the suspect got access to another employee’s credentials. They said the employee whose credentials were used was not authorised to credit high-valued incentives into a merchant’s e-wallet in the form of incentives.