Punjab Police bust online job fraud racket, 4 persons arrested in Assam

Chandigarh, February 22

The Cyber Crime Division of the Punjab Police has busted an international online job fraud racket with the arrest of four persons from different districts of Assam, said DGP Gaurav Yadav here today. The modus operandi used by this gang was to lure innocent persons into trap by offering lucrative ‘work from home’ jobs through a telegram group mobile app.

“To gain trust, the fraudsters would initially give small tasks to the victim and in return pay a small amount of money for accomplishing the task. Later, the victim was asked to deposit money on different pretexts in lure of a bigger return,” said the DGP, while adding that with these arrests the Punjab Police has exposed another trail, leading to a deep-rooted cyber fraud nexus spread across the country.

Those arrested have been identified as Jahirul Islam, Rafiual Islam, Mehabub Alam and Azizur Rehman. Police teams have also seized two swipe machines, two biometric scanners, one eye scanner, one fingerprint scanner, 38 PAN cards, 32 debit/credit cards, 16 SIMs, 10 voter cards, nine Aadhar cards, 10 bank account passbooks/chequebooks, five government stamps, five mobile phones, one laptop, two pen drives and one SBI ID card from them.

ADGP, Cyber Crime, V Neeraja said that following a complaint from a woman, who was duped of Rs 25 lakh by the fraudsters, a cyber crime team under SIs Jujhar Singh Janjua and Davinder Kashni conducted investigation and found that the gang was running their operation from Assam, she said.

Jahirul and Rafiual, who were arrested from Nagaon district of Assam, revealed that they were running a customer services point for providing online services, and to make quick bucks they misused the documents of people for making duplicate PAN cards, voter cards, Aadhaar cards using Adobe Photoshop software. These were further used for opening baak Accounts and obtain SIMs on the directions of Mehabub.

The ADGP said that thereafter Mehabub was arrested from Guwahati district, who revealed that he came into contact with Azizur Rehman, who asked him to provide bank accounts on a commission basis. Police teams have also arrested Azizur from Morigaon district of Assam.