The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha Police arrested three fraudsters from Uttar Pradesh on the charge of deceiving investors.
The arrested persons – Sachin Pal, Ankush Singh and Kuldeep from Vijaynagar police station area in Ghaziabad – were arrested under Sections 419/420/467/468/471/120-B IPC, r/w Sec.66 (C) & (D) of Information Technology Act, 2000 and are being brought under transit remand to Odisha, EOW officials said on Sunday.
The EOW acted on the allegation of one Parthasarathi Pattnaik against a digital marketing channel registered as www.r46.in that was cheating the general public in the name of giving extra income through digital marketing.
After receiving a WhatsApp message, Pattnaik came in contact with a person who induced him to create an account in the above website and also to purchase items virtually on the website for which he would be getting some lucrative commission of 15 per cent to 20 per cent on the product price.
The complainant invested Rs 6.5 lakh through this website, and his total commission along with invested amount was being reflected as Rs 7.31 lakh in the wallet of the website.
But, when he wanted to withdraw the amount, the same was not allowed. The website had a telegram channel “eBay Official work channel No.7” with a rolling subscriber base of more than 65 thousand members.
It was found that the fraudsters developed the fake website i.e. www.r46.in for digital marketing and used to contact the general public through whatsapp inducing them to log in the website for extra income in way of commission of 15-20 per cent for buying digitally any kind of products from the leading websites like e-bay.com, Amazon, Shopee, Zomato, Paypal, Google, Phonepe, Flipkart, etc., for which they have to create a wallet with the website and then link the wallet with the bank account in order to recharge or withdraw the money.