Friday, 10 MAY 2024 | PNS | DEHRADUN
The cyber crime unit of the Uttarakhand Special Task Force (STF) exposed a national-level cyber crime by arresting five members of a gang from Delhi-NCR who were allegedly scamming the families of Kargil martyrs. They used to pose as the officials from the Defence Ministry to scam victims under the pretext of providing special grants, increased pensions and other financial facilities to the families of Kargil martyrs, the STF senior superintendent of police Ayush Agrawal said in a Press conference on Thursday. He said that this fraud came to light after a family of a Kargil martyr living in the Gumaniwala area of Dehradun was scammed by the gang. The victim registered a complaint stating that the gang duped them of Rs 45 lakh in the name of a file processing fee and other charges to get benefits from the government. Agrawal said that a team led by the deputy superintendent of police of the cyber crime police station of STF Ankush Mishra started an investigation. They found in the investigation that the gang was operating from a fake call centre in the Lakshminagar area of Delhi. The team went there and arrested them late on Wednesday. The STF also recovered eight mobile phones and laptops, 42 SIM cards and 42 debit cards along with several fake identity cards, Aadhaar cards, PAN cards and an amount of more than Rs 1.07 lakh from the gang’s possession. The authorities have also frozen the bank accounts of all the accused. The arrested accused have been identified as Kapil Arora (33) from Delhi, Rahul Kumar Dutta (33) from Bijnor, Ravi Saini (33) from Ghaziabad, Rajesh Kumar Yadav (32) from Gorakhpur and Anurag Shukla (33) from Kanpur. The SSP said that the accused revealed during the interrogation that they had been running fake call centres in Delhi NCR for the past six months to scam the families of martyrs and retired senior citizens. Some of the accused had worked in a call centre of an insurance company in 2016 from where they got the idea to scam people across the country. They have claimed to get the details and information of the martyrs’ families from Google. The STF is working to identify all the victims of the gang and will act further accordingly, SSP added.
