Four held in Delhi’s Dwarka for loan app fraud

Delhi Police on Wednesday said that they arrested four persons for allegedly running an extortion scheme with two Chinese nationals by using loan applications to blackmail people by morphing their photographs

Delhi Police on Wednesday said that they arrested four persons for allegedly running an extortion scheme with two Chinese nationals by using loan applications to blackmail people by morphing their photographs.

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Deputy commissioner of police (outer) Brijendra Yadav identified the suspects by their first names as Anil, 35, the alleged mastermind of the racket, Alok, 24, Avnish, 22, and Kannan, 35.

Police said that a grievance was lodged on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal on July 14 and earlier on May 28by Narela resident Himanshu Goel who alleged that he was lured through an advertisement on a social media website, which claimed to provide hassle-free loans of upto ₹50,000 via an app “On Stream”. When Goel downloaded the app, it asked for access to his contacts, gallery and other media on the phone, which he allowed.

Thereafter, he was only granted a loan of ₹6,870. However, alleged representatives of the app started harassing him to pay back the loan at high interest rates and threatening to release his morphed photographs on social media. Even after he ended up paying ₹1 lakh to them, the representatives kept harassing him, he told police.

Based on the complaint, police said they registered a case and began investigating the matter.

During the investigation, police used technical surveillance to trace the culprits near Ramphal Chowk in Dwarka. Police found that the suspects were operating a call centre on the first, third and fourth floor of a building in Dwarka Sector 7 for the last two years. “we conducted a raid at the premises and found that the syndicate employed 134 women telecallers, 15 men callers, and three team leaders. It was led by Anil, who is the mastermind,” DCP Yadav said.

The probe revealed that the suspects had purchased 300 SIM cards in the name of a firm Silpani International and were using 100 of these SIM cards to send derogatory WhatsApp messages to compel victims to comply with their extortion threats. The other 200 SIM cards had already been termed spam and discarded.

Police said the suspects had so far siphoned ₹10 crore to two Chinese persons only identified by the names “Mr Albert and Mr Trey”. The suspects also earned about ₹3 crore as commission since March 2021, police said, adding that the suspects used to keep in touch with their Chinese counterparts using multilingual DingTalk app.

Police said that the telecallers would threaten people and blackmail them with morphed photographs of themselves and their relatives. Victims would then pay the amount they asked. However, police are yet to ascertain the number of people they have defrauded so far.

Police said they have also asked the 149 staff members to join the investigation.