Bengaluru Police bust Rs 854 crore cyber investment fraud, arrest 6 people

Two former call centre employees ganged up with seven others to pull off a Rs 854-crore cyber heist, according to investigations by the Bengaluru police. 

Six suspects have been arrested but three kingpins are at large, city police chief B Dayananda announced on Saturday. 

The gang is suspected to have conned more than 5,000 people in 30 states and Union Territories. The Central Crime Branch (CCB) has so far been able to freeze only Rs 5 crore in bank balance. 

The fraud was carried out through clickbait advertising on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The victims were asked to invest in “rewards” schemes that would “double” their money overnight. All they had to do was complete “easy” tasks, such as liking and sharing social media posts and videos. 

To gain their victims’ trust, fraudsters rewarded them initially. But as the victims put in more money, the fraudsters just disappeared. 

Eighty-four mule accounts acted as the conduits for these money transactions. The gang opened the mule accounts in the name of ordinary people by offering them a commission. 

“Private bank employees eager to meet their targets helped the fraudsters by failing to run stringent KYC checks,” a police officer said. 

The six arrested are Manoj alias Jack, Phanindra, Chakradhara alias Chakri, Srinivas, Somashekar alias ‘Uncle’, and Vasanth.

They are all from the northern Bengaluru suburbs of Vidyaranyapura and Yelahanka, according to the police.

The six men worked in an office-like war room in Yelahanka where financial transactions were monitored and processed. As soon as a victim transferred money to a mule account, one of these men transferred it to another account to prevent the money from being detected and frozen by the police. 

Of the 5,013 cases registered across the country, at least 487 were from Karnataka, including 17 from Bengaluru, Dayananda said. 

The CCB began tracking the gang while investigating a police complaint lodged by a Bengaluru resident, who lost Rs 8.5 lakh to the scamsters. The complainant gave the police the recipient’s bank account number.

When the police checked with the bank employee who had verified the documents and facilitated the account opening, they learnt that the account holder was innocent. 

But the bank employee happened to vividly remember a person who had accompanied the account holder at the time of opening the account. “We soon identified that person as Vasanth and arrested him. He led us to other suspects,” an officer close to the investigation said.