Bhubaneswar: The Commissionerate Police in Bhubaneswar on Thursday arrested four cyber fraudsters for allegedly duping people on Telegram app through 46 mule bank accounts.
The accused persons have been identified as Trupti Ranjan Patra (31), Banalata Sahoo (27), Manas Ranjan Suna (35) and Nihar Ranjan Paikray.
Police have seized one mobile handset, a list of mule bank accounts with Federal Bank, Bhubaneswar, screenshots of the victim’s chat in the Telegram/Whatsapp group, screenshots of Whatsapp chats from the accused mobile phone, bank account transactions of the accused and victim, and statements of victim/other a/c holders as evidence.
According to the police, one Abdul Akbar Khan on April 4 registered a case at the Cyber Crime and Economic Offence police station, Bhubaneswar.
“On February 17 Khan received a link on Telegram app to join a group wherein he was asked to give ratings at websites for which he would get some money. Gradually after earning his trust, he was told that they had some schemes wherein he could invest money and get lucrative returns. Falling into the trap Khan gradually deposited Rs 11 lakh in their bank accounts,” informed Bhubaneswar DCP Prateek Singh briefing reporters today.
The DCP said that police during its investigation came to know that money had been deposited in different accounts.
” When we tried to find out these account holders we came across details of one Nihar Ranjan Paikray who was staying in the Airfield police station area and then we got the chain wherein we came across one Trupti Ranjan Patra who is the main agent and creates mule bank accounts. He had created a total of 42 accounts in a private bank. In one of the accounts we observed that Rs 46 lakh has been transacted,” the DCP explained.
According to the police, the victim saw an Online Job on the messaging platform Telegram and contacted the person through WhatsApp who allured him to like different products online and earn money and then invest in online trading by persuading him to send money to different accounts to get high returns. These accounts were Mule Accounts created by State level Agents. Out of his total transactions, one was a Federal Bank Account. During the investigation, it was found that a State Level Agent of Federal Bank, Bhubaneswar, in this case, works under the main accused i.e kin and the agent persuades other people to open bank accounts at Federal Bank and then share their Aadhar Card details, Bank details, OTP, Change their phone number within 24 hours and for transactions of unknown funds in their bank accounts in exchange for money in the perception of using it for online trading illegally and share with the main accused kin through Whatsapp.
Then the State Level Agent made the people open an account at the Binance Trading application through their Aadhar authentication within 24 hours. There were 42 Federal Mule Bank accounts of Bhubaneswar were opened. All the account holders of Federal Bank were well aware that they had sold their accounts for illegal online transactions and established a mule bank account network where lakhs and lakhs of fraud amounts were transacted daily as per the Bank statements to earn high return commission quickly.
In the course of the investigation, police gathered digital evidence, and took screenshots of the WhatsApp chats and bank accounts transaction history from the evidence collected so far, it was well established that the accused persons committed the offence liable under sections 419, 420, 467, 468, 471, 120 B IPC read with 66C, 66D of IT Act.
