Mumbai cyber police arrest UP man part of online loan scam

MUMBAI: The Mumbai cyber police have arrested a 24-year-old man from Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly being part of a gang that extorted money from people via an online loan app

MUMBAI: The Mumbai cyber police have arrested a 24-year-old man from Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly being part of a gang that extorted money from people via an online loan app. The gang blackmailed creditors with sexually morphed photographs and extorted large sums of money from them, according to officials.

Mumbai cyber police arrest UP man part of online loan scam

The accused, Gulshan Kumar, was arrested by a team from the Bandra police station’s cyber cell. According to the police, his role was to receive the extorted money deposited in different bank accounts, withdraw it in cash and give it to another intermediary, who would convert it into cryptocurrency and send it to foreign destinations.

The police have recovered nine debit cards and three mobile phones from Kumar, who was booked under section 308(2) (extortion) of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita and section 67A (publishing or transmitting sexually explicit material in electronic form) of the Information Technology Act. He has been remanded to police custody till Friday.

According to the police, the gang that Kumar was part of would entice people to use an app providing short-term loans. They would then send the users phishing links that were disguised as links to submit documents for applying for loans. If users clicked on these links, the gang would gain unauthorised access to their phone galleries and contact lists.

The gang would then create sexually morphed images of the users to blackmail them and extort money from them even if they had repaid their loans, said the police officer. The gang used virtual private networks to mask their IP addresses.