Meesho Employee Gets Fraud Text From Pseudo CEO; Flags New Startup Scam

The scammer whatsapped a Meesho employee pretending to be the CEO of Meesho Vidit Aatrey and demanded to make a purchase on Paytm immediately for a client gift. The message promised the reimburse the spent amount.

New Delhi: A Meesho employee Shikhar Saxena in a recent tweet has highlighted the new way of phishing by scammers in which they are trying to cheat people by pretending to be the CEO of the company. He shared the screenshot showing the message he got on the personal WhatsApp account from under disguise of Meesho’s CEO Vidit Aatrey.

Interestingly, the WhatsApp number that the victim got has the profile pic of Meesho’s CEO. The scammer first asked Shikhar if he is available pretending to be Meesho’s CEO. Once Shikhar replied positive, he then tried to lure him into the trap by asking him to make a purchase on Paytm for a client’s gift. The pretender promised to reimburse you.

The Meesho employee didn’t fall into the trap, instead he shared the screenshot on Twitter to spread awareness regarding new kind of scam in the startup world – message from the CEO.

Latest scam in the startup world - message from the CEO. pic.twitter.com/IIsZYYQsbx — Shikhar Saxena (@_shikharsaxena) April 6, 2023

Netizens React

Zypp Electric co-founder and Akash Gupta reacted and said few people shared this to him.  He queried what’s this fraud now.

Dheeraj Kumar Sidana shared the screenshot in the comment section and said it happened to him as well. It appeared in the screenshot that he was being asked to buy 10 pieces of App Store code gifts with Rs 10000 value on each. Moreover, he was being promised to reimbuse the amount after the meeting was over. There had been provided a link through which he could purchase items.

Another netizen Souvik Das agreed with the new type of startup scam and shared the screenshot. It appeared that he received the WhatsApp message from a recruiting manager at Times Jobs. It promised to give the daily wage of about Rs 13000 and gave the Job description where it needed to follow celebrity media platform and get a paid.