ROURKELA: In a significant breakthrough, Rourkela cyber wing police have arrested nine cyber fraudsters for running a pan-India share trading racket and seized Rs 1.41 crore in 23 mule accounts.
Another 176 such accounts are under verification.
Key operators of the fraudulent stock trading racket were arrested from Rourkela and Chhattisgarh, DIG (Western Range) Brijesh Kumar Rai and Rourkela SP Nitesh Wadhwani on April 9 told mediapersons.
A raid at a residential apartment at the posh Civil Township of Rourkela led to the arrest of two persons, and another raid at an apartment at Basanti Colony resulted in the arrest of five persons.
These seven persons were found to be mule account operators of the racket.
Subsequently, the kingpin of the racket, Kisan Agrawal (26) and his brother Kunal (25) were arrested from Raipur in Chhattisgarh.
Rai said the investigation revealed that all nine were part of a share trading fraud racket which was operating using a fake App titled ‘TradeNow’ with daily transaction value worth over Rs 50 lakh.
Racket kingpin Kishan, originally a resident of Mowa police station in Rapir district, obtained a golden visa in February to avail resident status in Dubai for two years.
Living in Dubai, he used to run the racket in India and other countries.
SP Wadhwani said Kishan had recently returned to Raipur from where he and his younger brother were picked up during the course of the investigation.
He said transactions were routed through Hawala operators and it constituted an international organised crime racket across several south and West Asian countries.
The scale of fraud is under scrutiny. Wadhwani said the racket members and their accounts used as mules were found involved in 27 cases across India, as ascertained through Samanvaya Portal of Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), Ministry of Home Affairs.
Further investigation is underway amid suspicion that the racket’s tentacles may be spread on a much higher scale.
The seizures included five laptops, 31 mobile phones, 68 SIM cards, two Jio fibre Network routers, 20 ID documents, four bank passbooks and cheque books, two pen drives, 19 debit/ATM cards.
A case has been registered at the Cyber Crime & Economic Offences police station of Rourkela police under sections 318(4), 319(2), 336(3), 338, 61(2) and 111(2)(b) of BSN read with sections 66-C and 66-D of IT Act.
Apart from Kishan and Kunal, the other arrested include Arjun Singh of Rudraprayag in Uttarakhand, Girdhari Singh (24) of Jashpur in Chhattisgarh, Ajay Kumar (25) of Korba in Chhattisgarh, Sandeep Kumar Soni (28) of Baloda Bazar district in Chhattisgarh, Soumendra Singh Rajput (27) and Dinesh Sahu (25) of Janjgir Champa district in Chhattisgarh and Abhijit Bharadwaj (27) of Raigarh in Chhattisgarh.
Police in an advisory also appealed people to remain alert while downloading apps and avoid taking investment tips from social media platforms and carefully check the veracity of stock market brokers and apps with SEBI.