ROURKELA: Bondamunda police in Rourkela on Tuesday arrested two local youths for their alleged link to a racket in Bihar which was engaged in arranging mule bank accounts for routing high-value proceeds of cyber crimes.
The accused, Sheikh Alam (22) of Railway Colony and Yashraj Singh (24) of Gandhi Road area, were booked under sections 318 (2), 318(4) and 111(2), 61(2) and 3(5) of BNS and sections 66(C) and 66(D) of the IT Act.
Rourkela SP Nitesh Wadhwani said the duo was working for a Bihar-based criminal syndicate and had engaged four to five interns. Together, they were luring and mobilsing individuals to open current accounts and obtain SIM cards using their documents, he said.
Wadhwani further said the Bihar-based handlers of the arrested duo would visit Rourkela once a month and collect bank passbooks of the mule current accounts, ATM and SIM cards paying between `15,000 and `20,000 per account. The mule accounts were being supplied to criminals to route proceeds of cyber crimes.
The SP said in the past one month, the accused duo had supplied 22 mule accounts. After verification, it was found that 11 accounts were linked to 20 cyber crime complaints across the country including Haryana, Delhi, Punjab, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and others.
Wadhwani said the two accused were produced in court. Further investigation is underway to find out involvement of others in the racket and trace the flow of proceeds of cyber fraud.