The Special Task Force (STF) of the Odisha Police on Thursday arrested a manager of private telecom subscribers in connection with an OTP-sharing scam. The accused is found sharing OTPs with clients including Intelligence operatives of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents in Pakistan.
It may be recalled here that STF had arrested three persons including a teacher on 14 May last in connection with racket. With the latest arrest, four persons have so far been taken into custody in connection with the racket.
Pradyumna Kumar Sahoo (32), a native of Nayagarh, who worked as territory sales executive in Idea and as Jio Point manager, was nabbed after a manhunt.
The accused sold more than 650 pre-activated SIMs and pre- activated PayTM Wallets to Pathani Samanta Lenka who was arrested earlier in this case.
These SIMs and Wallets were sold to various cyber criminals and PIO (Pakistani Intelligence Operatives). Some of the SIMs and wallets were used by PIOs/ ISI agents including some based and located inside Pakistan mainly from Karachi and Balochistan.
Further investigation in this regard is on. It was found that the accused used to generate multiple SIMs on the same identity by befooling and tricking the unsuspecting SIM buyers on the pretext of some technical issues and glitches, said STF officials.
It was learnt that for activation of different wallets i.e. PhonePe, Google Pay and others, the Registered Mobile Phone Numbers (which is linked with the Bank Account) are mandatory but in case of Paytm wallet account, the customer once activated the same (T) OTP verification can also share the USER ID & Password to others (having different mobile number) for operating the said account. STF will study and analyze this and if needed, will write to Paytm to change the settings, added STF officials.