Gang of cyber criminals busted in Palwal; 5 held

Tribune News Service

Advertisement

Palwal, June 7

With the arrest of five persons, including a woman, the district police have claimed to have busted a gang of cyber criminals for committing a fraud of Rs 31 lakh in a span of seven days. The police have registered a total of 43 FIRs in this period.

SP Deepak Gahlawat, said the gang committed the fraud online by cracking the Aadhar enabled payment system (AEPS) and withdrew the money secretly. Revealing that while the money was withdrawn fraudulently between May 24 and June 2, he said the gang could have duped many more, if it was not busted. Though no cash has been recovered, the police have frozen the account having an amount of Rs 10 lakh.

“Some more accounts of the accused identified as Rohit Tyagi (33), Chitranjan (28),Amir Husain (27), Kiran (28) and Tula Ram (40) which are to be accessed, are expected to lead to the recovery of more money,” says the SP. While Rohit hails from Ghaziabad, Chitranjan, Amir and Kiran hail from Delhi. The fifth accused Tula Ram, a resident, has reported to have helped in providing the records of the customers.

Revealing the modus operandi, he said the copies of the land registration deeds were acquired from record room here by the accused who prepared a rubber clone of the finger print on the document with the help of a machine and shortlisted the Adhaar numbers linked to the bank accounts.

He said as the AEPS requires an electronic transaction processing platform, accounts were created online by submitting the documents. The fraudsters used the App of the electronic transaction processing platform and initiated transactions using a biometric device and cloned rubber finger print. As soon as the transaction got completed, money went into the wallet of the electronic platform from then it was transferred into their bank account. The electronic transaction processing platform is used with the help of Apps like Payworld and Fingpay.

With 230 rubber finger prints recovered he said the arrest has prevented a fraud to the tune of Rs 3 crore, it is claimed.

A bio-metric machine, 11 debit cards, 270 Sim cards, clone rubber stamp machine, a laptop, scanner, 10 copies of land registration and some bank documents have been recovered. The accused have been remanded in five-day police custody.