Hyderabad: The Pakistani scamsters have their handlers in India, mostly Gulf returnees who they had met at their work places.
Once the victim deposits money in an Indian bank account, it is withdrawn by the Indian handler and handed over to hawala operators who send it to Pakistan usually through Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The Indian handler gets up to 15 per cent of the sum as commission.
The Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) had earlier alerted the home ministry that hundreds of bank accounts in India were being used by Pakistan based fraudsters through their Indian counterparts.
In a case detected by the Central Crime Station, Hyderabad, the police found more than 120 bank accounts operated by two Indian handlers, one of them identified as Sulaiman Kutty from Kerala.
Police arrested Sulaiman from his native place in Palakkad district, but the second handler, Nasir, who handles the hawala part of the business, is still absconding.
“The first part of the operation is similar to the Nigerian scam, in which the looted money is parked in bank accounts operated by the Indian handlers. Once the cash is withdrawn from ATMs, the cash is turned into hawala to reach Pakistan”, said an investigation official with the CID.
“There is already a well organised hawala chain operating in Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Kerala, which connects the Gulf rackets. Their modus operandi is to circulate the money in India but transfer the value to some other country,” he said. When people working in the Gulf want to transfer money to their families in India, they approach hawala racketeers whose charges are meagre.
“After the racketeers receive the money, their counterparts in India distribute the cash, which has been earlier looted through these scams. This way the value is transferred to Pakistan as well. They also smuggle gold and transfer the value”, said the CID official.
