Mumbai Crime: The scamsters who targetted rich held

Cyber cops probing the cheating of highnetworth individuals recently nabbed five people behind this The probe has found that the accused ran an interstate racket that siphoned off money directly from bank accounts of victims by offering them free phones or Diners Club cards The accused have good educational backgrounds and were involved in similar crimes in the past At least 16 FIRs have been filed within 2 months and 16 more complainants have come up in Mumbai and Navi Mumbaimidday had reported on a scam in which welltodo people were targeted by scamsters An offence was registered by a developer in the West Region Cyber police station on January 31 The complainant told the cops that on December 24 2022 he had received a call from a person identifying himself as Saurav Sharma He claimed to be from Citi Bank and offered a Citi Bank Diners Club card Sharma also said if he accepted the card he would get a membership of Willingdon Club TardeoAlso Read Mumbai Crime Promised a job woman sold for marriage at Rs 2L by insta friendHow he was cheatedldquoThe complainant was provided two links mentioning lsquocitibankrsquo and they sought his name address Aadhaar card and PAN card numbers To make the communication authentic a certificate of the Department of Telecommunication was sent to him But after he clicked on the links Rs 981 lakh was withdrawn from his account The money was later used to purchase golden coins from a Tanishq showroom in Chennai The complainant immediately rushed to the Mumbai police and an FIR was lodgedThe Cyber cops had received complaints of the same nature and the number of victims was increasing DCP Cyber Balsing Rajput formed a team under the leadership of Inspector Suvarna Shinde assisted by Inspector Mahendra Jadhav API Amit Utekar PSIs Rahul Khetre Deepak Tayde and Vijay Kumar Ghorpade to trace the scamstersldquoThere were two modus operandi used in this fraud One was targetting people by randomly calling or sending them messages Secondly targetting persons who had recently purchased highend cars such as BMW or Mercedes In most cases the target would be using Iphones so fraudsters would send a bugged Android phone within couple of hours for freerdquo DCP Rajput saidAccused heldThrough the links provided by the fraudsters the couriers who sent the mobile phones were questioned and police found that the fraudsters were operating from different states Teams were sent to Chennai Delhi Uttar Pradesh and Haryana They managed to nab 3 accused Nandkumar M Chandrashekhar 35 John David Raj 35 and Pavathrani Ramki Parthsarthi 33 from Chennai Tamil Nadu The police seized R388 lakh and 122 Singapore dollars from themAfter the arrests cops got information about the second in command behind the racket Aiyappan Murugsen 35 was arrested from Delhi while prime accused Ashish Ravindranathan from Ahmedabad is absconding ldquoAiyappan and Ashish were together for the past 14 years and have committed similar crimes by cheating people on the pretext of offering them American Express cardsrdquo said a police officerDuring the interrogation the cops found that multiple SIM cards were used by the fraudsters and they were provided by a person from Haryana The team nabbed him identified as Premsagar Ramswarup 23 Premsagar has till now provided 1600 SIM cards of different service providers to the fraudsters These were distributed from Sitapur Uttar PradeshldquoThe accused would not only purchase gold coins but they would order highend phones from an electronic outlet and for the purchase use the victimsrsquo KYC details The gold and mobile phones were sold and the money would be routed to the prime accused Later there would be a 10 per cent commission for each member of the racketrdquo added DCP RajputPrime accused Ashish is an IIT dropout and has been involved in similar frauds since he was 19 years of age Raj has done Hotel Management and has knowledge of club cards and doubts which would be asked by victims Parthsarthi has an MBA while Aiyappan has completed mechanical engineeringHawala usedThe fraudsters used hawala to transfer the cash and also converted the money to Bitcoins The cops have frozen 46332 USDT from one personrsquos account ldquoThis racket eyed people from a high income group We urge citizens not to get trapped into free privilege cards and memberships of clubs and if they have been cheated they should register a complaint with Cyber policerdquo said Rajput