Hyderabad cops bust online gaming racket, arrest four people, including Chinese national

Four people including a Chinese national were arrested by Hyderabad Police from Delhi for allegedly cheating two people here by organising online gaming, a senior police official said on Thursday. Acting on the duo's complaints that they were cheated and lost Rs 97,000 and Rs 1,64,000 respectively after placing bets in the online gaming websites, the Cyber Crimes Wing of Hyderabad police registered cases under relevant sections of Telangana Gaming Act and Indian Penal Code.

Police arrested Yah Hao, a Chinese national (Head of Operations for South East Asia) and three Directors--Dheeraj Sarkar, Ankit Kapoor and Neeraj Tuli, Hyderabad Commissioner of Police Anjani Kumar told reporters.

The amount frozen by investigators in bank accounts (Gurugram) during investigation so far is nearly Rs 30 crore, Kumar said.

The total value of inward transactions on the two accounts traced so far is nearly Rs 1,100 crore, majority of which is in 2020, he said.

"Most of the remittances have been transferred to different other accounts which are being traced and some of the accounts are overseas.Total overseas remittances known as of now is nearly Rs 110 crore," Kumar said.

During the probe it came to light that the domain name servers of the gaming websites are based out of China and the data hosting services are cloud-based in the US and operated from China.

The entire technical operation is run by the China-based directors/partners of these companies and the payments were being routed through India based payment service providers/gateways, he said.

"It is understood from the investigation so far that the companies are controlled through a firm called Beijing T Power Company based out of China," Kumar said.

During the investigation it was found that online gaming was being organised by initiating prospective gamers through social media platform--Telegram groups, wherein entry was limited by reference and each member who introduces a certain number of new members were paid commission, he said.

"On these groups, the admins will usually indicate the websites on which the registered members can play games and place bets.

These websites would be changed on a daily basis," he explained, pointing out that Telangana had passed a legislation banning online gaming in the state.

According to the Hyderabad Police chief, the investigation also revealed that the bank accounts and payment gateways were linked to the companies Linkyun, Dokypay and SpotPay and several other companies.

"The effort of the group is to constantly establish new companies and more operations from one company to other," Kumar said, adding the promoters and shareholders of these companies are Indians and Chinese.

Kumar further said they will be seeking support from other agencies like Enforcement Directorate, Income Tax Department and Registrar of Companies (RoC) as part of further investigations into the cases.