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Cyberabad police bust interstate online money-lending racket, arrest 6
The Cybercrime wing of the police investigated the racket after a large number of complaints from several victims.
The Cyberabad police in Hyderabad on Tuesday busted a multi-state online money-lending racket. Six people have been arrested from Hyderabad for operating the racket and their bank accounts, worth Rs 1.52 crore, have been frozen.
Cyberabad police commissioner VC Sajjannar told reporters that the Cybercrime wing of the police investigated the racket after a large number of complaints from several victims who had obtained small loans from online lending firms through various mobile applications.
“These companies, which attracted the gullible customers with attractive offers, later charged them with heavy interest rate up to 35 per cent on the loans. As per the investigation, as many as 70,000 people had fallen victims to this online money-lending racket,” he said.
Two young women and a man fell victims to the torture by online money lending apps in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The money lenders humiliated these borrowers as defaulters by sharing their details along with photos to all their contacts.
In the last one week, two persons died by suicide, unable to bear the coercive methods used by these online money lenders to recover their loan. A 29-years-old software engineer from Hyderabad, who was rendered jobless due to the crisis brought by the Covid-19, borrowed about Rs 70,000 from the online apps and could not repay. When the app organisers shared his details to all his contacts, he felt humiliated and hanged himself to death last Wednesday.
Similarly, another 24-years old woman from Siddipet town also died by suicide by consuming pesticide on last Monday when the online-lending company circulated her picture and details to all her contacts declaring her as a defaulter of Rs 3 lakh loan she had taken.
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Sajjannar said the Cyberabad police detected two online-lending agencies – Onion Credit Private Ltd with directors K Sharath Chandra and K Pushpalatha, and Cred Fox Technologies Pvt Ltd with K Sharath Chandra and BV Chaitanya as directors. Apart from them, three others – B Venkatesh, Sachin Deshmukh and Sued Ashiq were acting as collection agents for these two companies.
“There were in all 110 employees in these companies. Both the companies entered into agreements with nine non-banking finance companies – Superior Finlease Ltd, New Delhi; Lord Krishna Financial Services, New Delhi; Usha Financial Services Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi; i2i Technologies (RNVP Technologies Pvt. Ltd.), Ghaziabad; Zavron Finance Pvt Ltd, Nagpur; UMB Securities Limited, Bangalore; Fair Assets Technologies India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi; Liqui Loans (NDX P2P Pvt Ltd.), Mumbai and Krazybee Services Pvt Ltd., Bangalore.
These two companies designed various mobile apps, such as Cash Mama, Loan Zone, Dhana Dhan Loan, Cash Up, Cash bus, Mera Loan and Cash Zone, and had been luring people by offering loans through them. These mobile apps were available on Google play store.
“These companies were using very harsh, threatening and abusive methods to recover the loans from customers. They also accessed contacts of relatives and friends of the customers and sent them WhatsApp messages defaming the defaulter,” Sajjannar said.
He said notices were issued to all NBFCs and their managing directors. A notice has also been sent to Google to take down the applications because of their criminal activities. “We have seized three laptops, three desktops, 22 mobile phones and froze 18 bank accounts with cash to the tune of Rs 1.52 crore,” the commissioner said.
A case under Sections 420 and 506 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 66 of IT Act-2008, Sections 3, 10 and 13(1) of Telangana Moneylenders Act has been registered in Cyber Crime PS.
