Tuesday, 09 April 2024| PNS | DEHRADUN
The Uttarakhand Special Task Force (STF) arrested two men from a gang active in Dehradun duping people of southern States under the pretext of providing loans under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY). The gang has been working from Dehradun’s Premnagar area for the past several months in an organised manner. The man who has been running this gang even appointed local men from States like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to gain the victims’ trust, the STF senior superintendent of police Ayush Agrawal said. He said that the STF’s cyber crime team busted the gang with the help of the central government’s Pratibimb portal. The SSP said that the Pratibimb portal enables the authorities to know about cyber criminals active in their respective areas. This helps to eradicate any gang that can get bigger with time and make a place a cyber crime hub as seen in several areas like Rajasthan’s Bharatpur and Jharkhand’s Jamtara.
This is the first case the State’s authorities cracked using Pratibimb. He said that the gang mainly targeted victims of southern states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana who had registered complaints about cyber fraud on the government’s portal. Hundreds of complaints were registered in the portal from these states but the STF has analysed only 35 complaints so far. The victims had provided the mobile numbers used by scammers to dupe them. The mobile numbers helped the authorities to discover that the gang was operating from Dehradun. The STF took cognisance of the matter and started an investigation. The team stayed in the Premnagar area for about two weeks to gather evidence against the gang. They found that lakhs of rupees were being deposited in the bank accounts associated with these numbers daily from across the country. The gang members were withdrawing about Rs six lakh on average every week. They have received about Rs 1.5 crore in their suspicious bank accounts in the past two months, Agrawal said. The STF finally arrested two Uttar Pradesh residents, Rahul Chaudhary (30) and Siddhant Chauhan (22) on Sunday.
The STF also recovered Rs 1.31 lakh cash, 64 SIM cards, 11 ATM cards, 10 mobile phones, two passbooks and cheque books from seven different banks from both accused. The SSP said, “The mastermind of the entire gang is Deepak Raj Sharma from UP. As per the arrested accused, Sharma has also bought land in Suddhowala with duped money and is building a hostel on it. He has also opened a clothing store in Thakurpur. We are looking for him and other gang members who will be arrested soon.”
