BENGALURU: The cyber wing of CID has busted an online fraud gang, by arresting four engineering college dropouts who were hoodwinking people into submitting their bank credentials through e-commerce and investment websites run by them.
The accused lured customers through jaw-dropping discounts ranging from 80-90 percent on electronic products of reputed brands to attract customers and managed to capture the bank credentials of customers who purchased from the site.
The accused – Kapil Dev Suman alias Ajay Singh (26), Suraj Kumar (25), Sunil Kumar Suman (24) and Biplav Kumar (24) –operated from Bengaluru and Bokaro in Jharkhand.
The accused have so far captured the bank credentials of more than 16,000 customers and withdrew money from the customers’ accounts, which is said to run into crores. The accused had as many as 460 SIM cards which they used on their websites under Contact Us tab. They frequently used to change the number on the websites and update with new ones to avoid being tracked by the police, said Mr Pratap Reddy, ADGP, CID. Besides the e-commerce website www.paymaza.com where the targets were online shoppers, they also ran www.munafaperday.com, offering interest of 2 percent per day and for investments starting at Rs 1,000.
Kishore Chandra, DGP , COD and Pratap Reddy Deputy, DGP , COD addressing press conference about the arrest of the Cyber accused at CID office, in Bengaluru on Tuesday.
Investors would contact the accused and put in amounts as high as Rs 1 lakh to receive maximum benefits. But, the investors would realise later that they had not only lost the invested money, but also some amount from their bank accounts through fraudulent withdrawals.
The first arrest in the case was made after one Suresh Sakri, a resident of Bengaluru, approached cyber police on July 13 and lodged a complaint that two fraudulent withdrawals of Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 had been made from his account. The cyber police learnt that the amount was transferred to Ajay Singh on his SBM account in JP Nagar branch. The police with the help of bank officials managed to arrest Ajay Singh when he came to withdraw the money. It was only then the police learnt that Ajay Singh was Kapil Dev Suman and that he used a pseudonym to open the account with forged documents.
During the interrogation, Kapil named his other three partners who were arrested from Bengaluru and Bokaro. The accused had 28 different bank accounts where they received the money from the customers. The cyber team was headed by DySP M.D. Sharath. The investigating officers are still trying to trace the victims of the scam and have requested people who have been conned by the accused to contact on 080-22094507 or 9480800197.
Police had tough time nabbing culprits
While Kapil and Suraj were easily nabbed from the city, the other two accused Sunil, brother of Kapil, and Biplav gave the police a tough time. As the cyber police team reached Bokaro, the accused got suspicious of police movement and escaped.
They kept travelling between Bokaro, Ranchi, Bodh Gaya and Patna. The cyber team, based on a tipoff, caught them on July 22.
They had 600 domains
The accused knew that their website would be blocked some day.
To keep their racket running, they had purchased more than 600 domains. Once a website is blocked, they used to transfer the entire content of the blocked site to the new one and advertise it through Facebook and Google Ads, the police said.
