BHUBANESWAR: The Bureau of Immigration on Tuesday issued a look out circular against a Chinese national Liu Yi in connection with a fake loan app case registered by the Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of Odisha Police.
EOW officials said the accused used to run several illegal digital loan apps such as Koko loan, Jojo loan, Gold cash loan, Little borrow loan, Kredit bear, Silver kredit loan and Xpress credit loan etc to dupe people and extort money from them. One of these apps had around 1.5 lakh downloads.
While the Chinese mastermind of the scam is missing, the EOW has already arrested five of his Indian accomplices. The investigators are in touch with police of other states and EOW has frozen `6.57 crore in the bank accounts that were being used for the apps following raids in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
The scammers usually target needy people, especially from the lower middle class who are in need of small loans and credited loans in the range of Rs 3,000 to 10,000 to them through these apps directly to their bank accounts.
In the process, they stole all the sensitive data and contact details of the loanees for the purpose of extortion. DIG (EOW) Jai Narayan Pankaj said over 100 such complaints have been received in the State.