Aadhaar enabled payment scam busted, five held in Andhra Pradesh
KADAPA: Kadapa district police on Wednesday arrested a gang of five members accused of siphoning off a sum of Rs 5.9 crore from various bank accounts using the Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System (AePS). Police have identified 12 bank accounts that were being used by the accused and will forward the details to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for further probe.
The accused were identified as Nallagalla Venkatesh, Malla Ajay, Ganta Kalyan, Shaik Jani, and Pasupuleti Gopi, all natives of the Guntur and Prakasam districts. It has been learnt that the five accused have been booked in four other cases before. Police said another person involved in the case is at large and will be arrested soon.
Elaborating on the modus operandi of the gang, Kadapa SP KKN Anburajan said the accused obtained documents of the victims from government websites, including the Stamps and Registration Department, and cloned fingerprints.
The scam came to light when Sankaraiah, a resident of Ramanjaneya Puram under Chinna Chowk police station limits, observed that Rs 5,500 was withdrawn from his SBI account on December 7, 2022, without his knowledge.
He then filed a complaint through NCRP, following which the cybercrime police blocked the bank accounts of the offenders and froze the balance. Subsequently, the accused began threatening Sankaraiah to withdraw his complaint.
The victim then lodged a complaint with the Chinna Chowk police on August 15. A case was booked under Section 386 of IPC and Section 66 (D) IT Act. ASP (admin) Thusar Dudi formed a special team, who tracked the mobile numbers of the accused. Police arrested the gang when they arrived in Kadapa to extort money from the complainant.
The investigation officers collected the WhatsApp numbers of the accused, run a call detailed report (CDR), traced their movements and found that they swindled money from Sankaraiah’s bank account through AePS. They learnt that they were operating from Guntur.
Police have recovered a polymer liquid bottle, a transparent wrap cover, a photostatic negative film with fingerprints, aloe vera gel, a biometric capturing machine used for producing clone fingerprints and an external hard disk, a rubber stamp machine, four mobile phones, a hard disk and a four-wheeler car from the possession of the accused.
The accused managed to collect thousands of fingerprints, Aadhaar numbers and other credentials of thousands of people in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana using the paraphernalia and further stored it in an external hard disk.
Anburajan explained that one of the accused, Venkatesh, collected fingerprints, Aadhaar card and bank details of the victim from the black market. He took help from five other people and gained access to the victim’s bank account by cloning his fingerprints and transferred money from the victim’s bank account to his through biometric devices and Bank Customer Service Point (BCSP) operated by another accused, Sk Johnny Basha, at Allavaripalem in Phirangipuram, Guntur district. The SP added that the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) has so far received 412 petitions pertaining to similar cases and identified 416 victims across India.
What is APeS?
The Aadhaar-enabled Payment System allows people to have access to various banking facilities like fund transfers, cash withdrawals and deposits via Aadhaar. The bank-led model allows all Aadhaar card holders to make monetary transactions at ATMs or points of sale (POS) using a unique identification number (UID)