₹16,181-crore cyber fraud case: Thane police arrest two more

Police have arrested two more people in connection with a cyber fraud case involving the transfer of ₹16,181.41 crore from bank accounts opened in the names of slum dwellers. One of the suspects is a chartered accountant who provided fake certificates to the income tax department, while the other suspect allegedly used bogus documents to send money abroad. The total number of arrests in the case is now 11.

Police have arrested two more people as part of their probe in the cyber fraud case wherein around ₹16,181.41 crore were allegedly transferred abroad through suspicious transactions from bank accounts opened in the names of slum dwellers.

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The two have been identified as Navi Mumbai resident Gaurav Bansal, 30, a chartered accountant and Satindsinha Hira alias Honey Singh, 35, a resident of Kandivali, who claims to be in the export-import business.

According to police officers, Hira used bogus documents to show several transactions and sent money abroad, especially to China. Bansal, on the other hand, provided more than 300 fake certificates to the income tax department, certifying those transactions which never happened, they added.

With this, the number of arrested persons has gone up to 11.

A senior officer from Thane police station, who did not wish to be named, said, “The black money which these two were getting from different sources was circulated through fake transactions and transferred in a rotation to different accounts. Some transactions were authentic but the majority of them were done with fake identities, using bogus legal documents to avoid detection by enforcement and regulatory authorities such as the income tax department. The main accused, Jitendra Pandey, has shown his connection with China and all transactions are led towards that country.”

The officer said the CA had provided fake form 15CA (it is a declaration required for foreign remittances) and 15CB (it is a certificate to be furnished by an accountant in cases where any payment/aggregate of payments exceeds ₹5 lakh in a financial year, chargeable to income tax is made to a non-resident, not being a company or to a foreign company). He added that the CA was paid barely ₹10,000 per certificate.

Bansal, according to the police, met Pandey in 2022 and since then he had issued 300 such certificates for different financial transactions. Pandey along with Amol Andhale had been doing these dubious transactions since 2021, the officer said, adding that they are now checking every one of them.

The police blew the lid off the racket in July while investigating a cyber fraud wherein ₹25 crore was siphoned off through the escrow account of a payment gateway company. It was found that of the ₹25 crore, an amount of ₹1.39 crore had been transferred to Riyal Enterprises, a company with offices in Vashi and Belapur. A further probe revealed that some of the 260 bank accounts used by Riyal Enterprises and its five partnership firms belonged to economically underprivileged people.