Five of Bihar gang that duped over 250 Covid patients arrested

The crime branch cyber-crime officers have busted an inter-state cyber fraud gang that duped hundreds of people across the country under the pretext of providing Remdesevir injection, oxygen, beds and life savings medicines used in the treatment of Covid-19 and mucormycosis

The crime branch cyber-crime officers have busted an inter-state cyber fraud gang that duped hundreds of people across the country under the pretext of providing Remdesevir injection, oxygen, beds and life savings medicines used in the treatment of Covid-19 and mucormycosis.

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The gang was operating from the naxal affected areas of Bihar and was duping people by posting posts on social media platforms under the name of renowned pharmaceutical giant Cipla. “They would accept money under the pretext of providing injection, medicines, beds in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Jaipur, Hyderabad, etc. in advance and later switch off the cell phone,” said Milind Bharambhe, joint commissioner of police, crime branch.

After Cipla started receiving complaints from relatives of Covid victims about being cheated, the pharma company informed the Cyber police about the same. Cyber police first lodged a first information report (FIR) in the matter on June 16 on the complaint of a Kandivli-based doctor AM Chavan who was cheated similarly.

During the investigation, the police identified over 100 mobile numbers shared through various bogus Twitter accounts. “From each number 10,000-15,000 phone calls were made. These numbers had sim cards of West Bengal origin,” said Rashmi Karandikar, deputy commissioner of police, cyber-crime.

After tracing locations of the suspicious numbers in Bihar, police inspector Mangesh Mazgar and assistant inspector Alka Jadhav-led police team went to Bihar and discovered that the accused persons are operating in groups from Katrisaray in Bihar, Sharif and Varsaliganj areas which are considered Naxal affected regions. The police team raided call centres of these groups and arrested Dhananjay Pandit, 20, Sharvan Paswan, 29, Dharmjay Prasad, 29, Nitish Prasad, 27, Sumant Prasad, 26 and detained a minor boy and seized 18 cell phones from them.

“The gang members, who are qualified and well educated, have cheated around 250 people and made a profit of ₹60 lakh during the period of the second wave of Covid-19. We have frozen 32 bank accounts belonging to the gang,” Bharambhe said.

“The gang was previously duping people in the name of providing loans, but during lockdown, they could not make much profit as people were not taking loans during the lockdown, hence they switched to cheating relatives of Covid victims who are urgently looking for medicines, beds and oxygen,” assistant inspector Alka Jadhav said.