Crooks use elite memberships to lure rich victims

The accused – identified as Nandkumar Chandrashekhar, John David Raj, P R Parthasarthi, Ayyappan Murugsen and Premsagar Ramswarup – are highly educated and operated the racket with a thorough plan.

Mumbai: The West region cyber police have arrested five people who allegedly duped their victims by luring them with an offer of memberships to elite clubs. The accused never asked their victims to pay any money but would make expensive purchases using their credit card details instead.

“It was a deliberate move to make purchases instead of asking for money outright. This way, even if the victims learned about the purchases, they had no way of knowing who had done it, as the orders would be placed in the victims’ names. The valuables would immediately be sold off and the money deposited in different accounts, thereby breaking the trail of money to prevent investigators from reaching them,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police Balsing Rajput, Mumbai Cyber. (Image for representation)

The accused – identified as Nandkumar Chandrashekhar, John David Raj, P R Parthasarthi, Ayyappan Murugsen and Premsagar Ramswarup – are highly educated and operated the racket with a thorough plan.

“In this case, all the victims are rich. It was a deliberate move to make purchases instead of asking for money outright. This way, even if the victims learned about the purchases, they had no way of knowing who had done it, as the orders would be placed in the victims’ names. The valuables would immediately be sold off and the money deposited in different accounts, thereby breaking the trail of money to prevent investigators from reaching them,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police Balsing Rajput, Mumbai Cyber.

However, the police too thought out of the box and started monitoring orders placed for expensive items from areas corresponding to the mobile phone locations of the accused. Subsequently, the cops laid traps at the addresses where the deliveries were to be received, leading to the arrests, added the officer.

“The accused had an arrangement through which they would obtain details of people who bought high-end cars like BMWs or Mercedes. They would call up these victims and tell them that their recent purchase had made them eligible for a free CitiBank Diners Club membership and send them forms to fill out and obtain their banking details. Further, as most affluent people prefer using iPhones, the accused would send a free Android handset to the victims, saying that the ‘process’ only worked on Android,” said Rajput.

Under the guise of ‘porting’ the victims to Android for further processing, the accused would capture the credit card details and net-banking information from their mobile handsets. Once this information had been obtained, the accused would allegedly purchase gold coins or expensive mobile phones using the banking details and credit card information of the victims. These would then be sold, and the proceeds would be distributed.

The police said that investigations into the matter were initiated in January this year after a Mumbai-based real estate developer lost ₹9.81 lakh to the accused. The victim had received a call in December last year from one of the accused, who claimed to be a relationship manager with CitiBank Diners Club International and, in the name of taking his details to process the membership, obtained his personal as well as credit card details. On January 2, the victim discovered unauthorised transactions on his credit card to the tune of ₹9.81 lakh and subsequently filed a complaint.

“In our probe, we found that a total of 32 such cases had been registered, where a similar modus operandi was used. Technical investigation indicated that the racket spanned several states, including Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra and teams were sent to all these locations,” Rajput said.

Accordingly, on February 11, the police arrested Chandrashekhar, 42, Raj, 35 and Parthasarthi, 33 from Tamil Nadu. Their interrogation led the police to Murugsen, 35, alleged to be the mastermind of the racket, who was picked up from the Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, and Ramswarup, 23, who was arrested from Haryana. Ramswarup is alleged to have provided SIM cards for the crime.

“Of the total 32 cases that have come to light against them so far, the accused have made ₹1.20 crore in just 16 of these cases. A preliminary technical investigation has also shown that the accused had used and discarded nearly 1,600 SIM cards in the last two and a half years, all of them provided by Ramswarup,” said Rajput.