BHUBANESWAR : Commissionerate Police on Sunday busted an inter-state cyber fraud racket and arrested 12 persons including seven Bihar natives, four hailing from Kerala and a citizen of Bhubaneswar in this connection.
The accused been identified as Debasish Tripathy (44) of Badagada area, Bijay Kumar (24), Pintu Kumar (27), Sanjay Kumar Ray (42), Gunjan Kumar (40), Manish Kumar (20), Arjun Raj (22) and Pankaj Kumar (37), all natives of Bihar, and Ajay Raj (39), Santhroo V (25), Ajit M (28) and Sarath Sasi (25) of Kerala. Initial investigation revealed the gang, infamously called Katri Sarai gang, mostly targeted people of northern and southern states and duped them of `20 crore in the last seven to eight years.
Police said the accused cheated people using three ways - by sending fake gift vouchers/ lucky coupons and collecting money towards registration fee to facilitate release of the expensive rewards, on the pretext of providing loans at low interest rate from different finance companies and luring them to earn huge amount of money through fictitious Kerala lottery scheme. As per police, Debasish and Pankaj were the masterminds of the gang. A web graphic designer by profession,
Debasish had come in contact with Pankaj and the other accused from Bihar a few years back. They then engaged the cyber criminals from Kerala and have been committing online crimes for the last seven to eight years. Addressing mediapersons, Bhubaneswar-Cuttack police commissioner S Dev Datta Singh said the gang operated from Debasish’s house. “Pankaj and Debasish collected customer database from various e-commerce sites through their agents in Bihar and Kerala.
They obtained mule bank account details from Bihar to receive the swindled money,” he said. Elaborating on their modus operandi, Singh said the accused sent fake gift vouchers/lucky coupons of different e-commerce platforms to Kolkata and then dispatch those to different people through posts. “The accused cheated the victims by claiming they had won lakhs of rupees or a four-wheeler, and demanded Rs 5,000 to Rs 12,000 towards registration fee to receive the prizes,” he added.
In the second method, the miscreants asked the victims to make a payment of Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,500 to process their loan applications while in their third technique, the accused demanded the victims to provide 10 per cent of the fake lottery prize amounting to `10 lakh, Singh said. “
Though police had not received any complaint against the gang members, they had credible information about their involvement in the online scams mainly targeting citizens of other states,” the police commissioner said, adding that 60 mobile phones, two laptops, one SUV, speed post stamps and other articles were seized from the accused