Monday, 04 MARCH 2024 | PNS | DEHRADUN
The cyber crime police station of Uttarakhand Special Task Force (STF) arrested two members of a gang that set up fake companies and bought at least 45,000 SIM cards to scam people across the country. The accused identified as Deepak Agarwal (47) and Gaurav Gupta (35) were arrested from Delhi. They are allegedly involved in opening fake GST firms and issuing fake Import Export Code (IEC) to open current bank accounts to collect money via scams, the senior superintendent of police of STF Ayush Agrawal said. He said that the STF came to know about the gang when a man registered a case in the Dehradun cyber crime unit a few weeks ago stating that he was duped of Rs 80 lakh. The accused presented themselves as employees of Indira Securities Company on their fake website to steal the public’s money. They often lured people to invest in stock trading through WhatsApp calls and messages and cheated them by making them download various apps through links. They used fake M2M SIM cards to commit these frauds and often removed them from devices after scamming the target. The SSP said that two weeks ago, the STF had arrested a man Mudassir Mirza (29) who had confessed to buying at least 45,000 fake M2M SIM cards to conduct cyber crimes across the country. The STF also recovered 3,000 SIM cards from him which is one of the biggest recoveries of fake SIM cards in the country. He said that STF came to know about the two accused Deepak and Gaurav during the interrogation of Mirza. A total of 38 complaints are registered against these bank accounts from various states including Bihar, Delhi, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Telangana. The SSP said that the supervisory officer of the case, deputy superintendent of police of cyber crime police station Ankush Mishra and investigation officer, inspector Vikas Bhardwaj will be providing assistance and coordinating with other state’s authorities regarding the criminal linkages of all arrested accused. These accused belong to the gang that uses advanced technology to dupe people and people must stay cautious while making online transactions with unknown people for quick profits, he added.
