Days after coordinated raids at cybercrime hot-spot villages in the Nuh district, the Haryana Police on Wednesday claimed to have unearthed pan-India cyber frauds of about Rs 100 crore. The police came to the conclusion after the interrogation of 66 cyber criminals arrested during the crackdown.
Addressing a press conference, Superintendent of Police (SP) Nuh, Varun Singla said with this, about 28,000 cases of cyber fraud have been traced across the country.
Giving details of the modus operandi, Singla said these cyber criminals used to commit the fraud by luring the victims with attractive offers of sale on products like bikes, cars, mobile phones, etc. by posting misleading advertisements on Facebook or OLX. The victims were then cheated on the pretext of courier charges, transportation of product, etc, but the product was never delivered to the customer.
The fraudsters also used to post an advertisement on social media platforms offering work from home mainly related to packaging of Natraj Pencils, promising an earning of Rs 30,000 per month and cheat gullible people on the pretext of registration fee, packing materials, courier fee etc.
Singla said similarly, these cyber criminals used to check random number series in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) digital payment Applications (Apps) to get the names of victims registered against those numbers on those Apps.The fraudsters then used to impersonate as some friend or relative of unsuspecting victims and request them to receive payment on their behalf on some pretext. They then used to send fake payment messages and get the money transferred from the victim’s accounts to their accounts. Similarly, on the pretext of buying old coins, gullible people were duped of huge sums of money.
These cybercriminals were also duping victims through sextortion by creating attractive profiles on social media platforms and luring the victims to come on a video chat where they used to carry out screen recording of the victims in compromising position and then extort huge sums of money from them.
The investigation has revealed information about 219 accounts of private and public sector banks and 140 UPI accounts which were being used for committing cyber frauds.
These bank accounts were mainly found to be activated online by defrauding gullible people on the pretext of providing a job and then taking their credentials such as Aadhar Card, PAN Card, mobile number and getting an online KYC done.
Apart from this, 347 SIM cards activated from Haryana, West Bengal, Assam, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, North East, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka circles of telecom companies have also been unearthed which were being used for cybercrime. During the investigation, the source of fake SIMs and bank accounts has been found to be mainly linked to district Bharatpur, Rajasthan.
On the intervening night of 28 April, 102 teams of 5000 policemen had raided 14 villages of Nuh simultaneously. During this raid, around 125 suspected hackers were detained. Out of these, 66 accused were later arrested and taken on remand for seven to 11 days.