E-Paper
Cyber con artists in the pen: Jharkhand, WB-based gang busted, five held in Prayagraj
The police team arrested five fraudsters and recovered five mobile phones, ATM cards, SIM cards etc from their possession.
Personnel of the cyber police station of the range busted a gang of cyber conmen who duped police pensioners of several lakh rupees.
The police team arrested five fraudsters and recovered five mobile phones, ATM cards, SIM cards etc from their possession. DSP Atul Yadav said the police team under inspector in-charge Rajeev Tiwari arrested Abdul Mateen aka Martin Da, 32, Basharat Ansari, 25 of Deoghar district in Jharkhand and Ankit Agarwal, 29, SK Zeeshan Hussain, 25 and Vijay Prasad, 25 of Kolkata with nine mobile phones, 15 ATM cards, 11 pre-activated SIM cards and a smart watch.
The accused duped retired police constable Bholanath Chaudhary of ₹10 lakh and retired sub-inspector Rajkumar of ₹20 lakh. The accused called the duo posing as treasury officers and took their bank account details and password etc on the pretext of updating their pension documents online.
An FIR was lodged in both incidents and investigations revealed that a Jharkhand gang of conmen was involved in the fraud.
Investigations revealed that the gang had committed 179 such frauds in different cities and states and had duped people of cash worth several crore rupees.
Twelve other members of the gang have already been arrested in other states of the country. The accounts of the accused have been frozen and a search was on for other members of the gang.
During interrogation, the kingpin of the gang, Abdul Mateen, said that the gang took details of pensioners through open source and online. Then they made calls to pensioners posing as treasury officers and took them into confidence.
The gang members took access to the OTP and other important details through remote accessing apps- AnyDesk, teamviewer etc and transferred their cash into bank accounts of acquaintances and known people.
Gang members SK Zeeshan and Ankit Agarwal lured acquaintances and relatives and used their bank accounts to transfer cash of cyber fraud victims in return for a commission of 8 to 9% on each transaction.
Later, they took out the cash using ATM cards at a commission of 8 to 9% on each transaction.
