BHUBANESWAR/ROURKELA : An international stock trading fraud spanning across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Dubai and Iran was busted by Rourkela police, which arrested nine persons in connection with the case on Wednesday.
Kisan Agrawal, kingpin of the racket, ran the operations from Dubai and scammed people through a fake app. Police said he claimed to have roped in Bollywood actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui for endorsement.
Police froze 23 mule bank accounts and seized `1.41 crore. They are carrying out verification of at least 176 other bank accounts.
The mule bank accounts were used in at least 27 cases to cheat victims in different parts of the country. Police said the miscreants were involved in hawala transfers too.
Briefing mediapersons here, DIG (western range) Brijesh Kumar Rai said Kisan and his younger brother Kunal of Raipur were apprehended from the neighbouring state.
Twenty-six-year-old Kisan lived in UAE and was defrauding citizens of India as well as other Asian countries. In fact, he had even obtained a golden visa residence permit in Dubai for two years. He had returned home recently.
Investigation revealed the accused used a fake App named TradeNow which was reportedly developed in Dubai, and duped unsuspecting investors. They swindled the money and carried out transactions to the tune of over ‘50 lakh on a daily basis, said Rai.
Rourkela SP, Nitesh Wadhwani said Kisan claimed to have roped in actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui for an advertisement on their Instagram account. “The deal was to take down the advertisement after one month but the accused continued to run it on various social media platforms,” he said.
Nawazuddin was possibly unaware about Kisan’s fraudulent activities but the matter is under verification. “Celebrities are advised not to promote any organisation without thorough verification,” the SP said. The fraudsters spent `6 lakh to `7 lakh every month for advertisements of the fake app on various social media platforms.
Five laptops, 31 mobile phones, 68 SIM cards, two routers, 20 identity documents, four bank passbook/cheque books, two pen drives and 19 debit/ATM cards were seized from the nine accused.
Interestingly, it was a special tenant verification drive in Rourkela which helped Rourkela police stumble upon the case. Police had launched the campaign to check migration of anti-social elements from neighbouring states.
During the drive, police were alerted of suspicious movement of a group of three to four youths who used to stay for a few days, leave and comeback after a brief period. Police initially thought the suspects were involved in IPL betting.
During a raid at a flat in posh Civil Township locality, police detained Arjun Singh (27) of Uttarakhand and Giridhari Singh (24) of Chhattisgarh and came across the pan-India trading scam running into crores of rupees.
Raid at another flat in city’s Basanti Colony area led to arrest of five others - Ajay Kumar (25), Sandeep Kumar Soni (28), Soumendra Singh Rajput (27), Dinesh Sahu (25) and Abhijit Bharadwaj (27). All five are from Chhattisgarh. The probe then led to the two siblings, the kingpins.