ROURKELA: Rourkela police busted an inter-State online fraud racket and arrested eight persons of the gang on Monday. Sources said, the cyber criminals including 27-year-old kingpin Pritam Kumar of Bihar’s Nawada district, was operating from a well-furnished apartment at Uditnagar here and targeting online shoppers on the pretext of them having won hefty cash prizes.
Rourkela SP Mukesh K Bhamoo said they received complaint from a victim who alleged that the gang had lured him into believing that he had won Rs 25 lakh from online shopping company Naptol and had to deposit two per cent GST to claim his prize. They began investigation and during the course received some more information from reliable sources and nabbed the accused from the apartment in Uditnagar.
While raiding the accommodation, they seized around 50 mobile phones and as many SIM cards among other items from their possession.
Bhamoo said “the modus operandi of the fraudsters was to track online shopping activities of the buyers and subsequently send them fake documents and scratch coupons from the companies they had recently transacted with. The gang would call them over phone posing as company employees and lure the victims into paying one to two per cent GST to claim prizes worth Rs 8-25 lakh.” Further investigation is underway to know how many other people were cheated by them, Bhamoo added.
Apart from the kingpin, the other accused were identified as Raju Sekharan Unnithan (54) of Kerala, Nagaram Parandha Mudu (30) of Andhra Pradesh, Arbind Kumar (24), Bablu Singh (35), Manish Kumar (29) and Rajesh Paswan (40), all of Nalanda, Nawada and Gaya districts in Bihar, and Rahul Pradhan (29) of West Bengal. They were produced in court under different sections of the IPC and IT Act.