The Bengaluru police busted a cybercrime network that cheated people by promising huge returns on investments, contacting them through instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Freezing a total of 84 accounts to which the money swindled had been laundered, police have recovered ₹5 crore. However, the total transactions in these 84 accounts total to ₹854 crore, indicating the extent of the scam. These accounts have been flagged in 5,013 similar complaints with the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) from across several States, said city Police Commissioner B. Dayananda on Saturday.
The city cybercrime police were probing 17 complaints registered in the city regarding the same modus operandi, in which victims lost a total of ₹49 lakh.
While the module has been busted, city police have only caught a city-based team of six persons working on a commission of 1% to 3% per transaction. The kingpins, who may be operating several such teams across the country or even abroad, are yet to be fully identified. This may just be one of the nodes in their larger network, sources said. “We have partially established their identity and we are working on tracking them down,” Mr. Dayananda said.
The gang was approaching gullible people through social media, WhatsApp, and Telegram applications under various names, enticing them to invest money for high returns.
“When people invested small amounts, the returns would double. As people turned greedy and invested large sums of money to the tune of several lakhs, in many cases borrowed from friends and family or pawning gold, these people turned incommunicado, vanishing with the money,” explained Mr. Dayananda.
How was it cracked
A woman who learnt from a friend that she invested in an app called Winegroup.life and made big profits downloaded the app and evinced interest to invest. She “invested” a total of ₹8.5 lakh in various payments to two accounts and a set of UPI IDs, only to realise she was cheated. She lodged a complaint in April 2023.
Investigating this case, all accounts through which this money was laundered were frozen. Of them, sleuths found one Bengaluru-based Subbu Enterprises that had received a part of the money from a frozen Tamil Nadu-based account. As this account holder was questioned, it turned out that it was a “mule account”, an account hired for rent, sometimes without the knowledge of the account holder. In this case, the account holder led the police to one of his friends who had recently taken his bank account details who turned out to be part of the cybercrime ring.
His interrogation led them to five other accused, all based out of the city, mostly in their 20s. Of them, the prime accused, now arrested, was linked to the kingpins of this scam only through social media and is not aware of their identity in real life. Acting on their instructions, he put together a team of six, including himself, in the city. While some hunted and arranged for mule accounts, others approached people in the city and cheated them for a commission on each successful transaction.
The larger ramifications
Mr. Dayananda said now they had busted a city-based team, part of probably a nationwide network, linked by the use of the same 84 bank accounts flagged as recipients of the swindled money in cybercrimes in 5,013 cases, they will now write to all the States which have reported cases linked to these 84 accounts.
“We have some leads on the identity of the kingpins of the scam and we will work with other agencies to track them down and arrest them,” he said.
