Cyber Fraud Case: Apple Store India Head, Telegram Officials Booked Over Platform Misuse In Fraud Cases

The Hyderabad cybercrime police have booked the head of the Apple Store in India and officials from Telegram in two recent digital fraud cases involving their apps. The legal action was taken after two residents reported the crimes. The combined loss in these cases, which involved sophisticated fraudulent apps for online investment and part-time jobs, was more than Rs 21 lakh.

Notably, senior officials of Google and Meta were also booked as accused in separate cybercrime cases a few days ago, on grounds of compliance and accountability for fraudulent activity hosted on their services.  

In the first case, a 62-year-old retired employee living in Somajiguda lost Rs 12.7 lakh. According to a report in The Times of India, the retiree saw an advertisement on the Telegram app promoting a stock trading platform. He clicked the ad, and was contacted by two individuals named Sonal Jagannath Naik and Kunal Sumaya. They explained the process to him and asked him to download an application called “JBara” from the App Store. He followed their instructions and downloaded the app and started trading through it. Initially, the fraudsters showed him profit and allowed him to withdraw Rs 15,000. Trusting the platform, the victim further transferred Rs 12.70 lakh into various bank accounts through the app between June 30 and July 23, 2026.

He was shown increasing profit on his investments, but when the victim tried to withdraw the profit of Rs 25.40 lakh showing on the app, he was blocked from using the app and was told to pay an additional Rs 47.89 lakh for an initial public offering (IPO) subscription to be eligible for withdrawal. Upon realising that he had been defrauded, the victim then approached the police.    

In a somewhat similar but separate incident, which also involves using Telegram, a 59-year-old housewife from Almasguda lost Rs 8.57 lakh in a part-time job scam. A Telegram advertisement offering work-from-home opportunities caught her attention, and she clicked on it on July 26, upon which she was redirected to a Telegram channel where people named Aarohi Verma, Divya Mittal, and Sanjeev Kumar asked her to perform Google reviews and ratings, and assigned her a few tasks. 

They paid her a small amount totaling Rs 9,670 for initially completed assignments and offered her a more lucrative ‘merchant order task’ which required her to transfer money to a specific Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ID to unlock a promised 30 per cent profit. She transferred a total of Rs 8.50 lakh between July 27 and 28, 2026, only to lose the entire amount.

The cybercrime officials have now booked five fraudsters along with officials from Telegram in these two cases under relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Reportedly, the police have said they intend to serve formal notices to the tech companies to obtain the digital footprints and bank details of the fraudsters, and to ensure that such fraudulent apps are removed from the platform. These scams also raise the question of the reliability of the apps available on the Apple Store.