NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has recovered 19.5 kg of gold, valued at around Rs 14 crore, from the bank locker of an alleged cyber fraudster who was recently arrested after landing at the Delhi Airport, an official said Monday.
The accused, identified as Punit Kumar, resident of West Delhi’s Moti Nagar area, had maintained the locker in the name of his mother at the Ballabgarh branch of the Indian Bank in Faridabad, Haryana.
“He was produced before the PMLA Special Court on April 3 and granted ED custody for a period of 12 days. He is presently under judicial custody,” an official said.
The ED had unearthed a money laundering racket involving foreign online gaming companies, allegedly exploiting Indian citizens.
Investigation revealed that one Ashish Kakkar, resident of Greater Kailash II and his associates, identified as Punit Kumar, resident of Karampura, Keshav Sood, resident of Anand Niketan, Chanakyapuri, and Shiv Dargar, resident of Saket, and others in connivance with other unknown culprits were engaged in large scale money-laundering as well as international Hawala money transfer to various parts of the world, including United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, Mauritius, Thailand, among others.
The ED in May, last year, carried out search operation at Kakkar’s properties under Foreign Exchange Management Act which resulted in recovery and seizure of a large number of incriminating documents, forged IDs, and digital devices for online transactions in foreign banks.
Punit Kumar was arrested on April 3 from the Terminal-3 of IGI Airport. A month later, it was revealed that he had hidden the proceeds of crime in form of gold in a locker at Indian Bank under his mother’s name. Subsequently, the probe agency sleuths conducted a raid and opened the bank locker to find bricks made of gold. Further investigation is underway, the official added.
Foreign gaming platforms draining India
The central probe agency had unearthed a money laundering racket involving foreign online gaming companies, allegedly exploiting Indian citizens. According to sources, a Special Task Force of ED had received inputs that various foreign-registered online gaming companies are illegally providing access to their gaming websites to Indian citizens through VPN or masking their actual identity as foreign online gaming websites.