PIONEER NEWS SERVICE | Dehradun
The Uttarakhand Special Task Force (STF) arrested two men in Dehradun on Saturday for their alleged involvement in operating a cyber fraud network linked to Myanmar. The accused were identified as Harjinder Singh and Sandeep Singh, both residents of Udham Singh Nagar district.
The deputy superintendent of police of Dehradun cyber crime unit of STF Ankush Mishra said that central authorities recently repatriated 540 Indian nationals from Myanmar in the first week of March 2025. Among them, 22 were from Uttarakhand. Following this, a special team was formed under the STF’s SSP Navneet Singh.
The team, working with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), gathered information on cybercriminal activities linked to Uttarakhand. He said that based on intelligence inputs, the STF team arrested two men near the district Panchayat toll post on Thano Road in Dehradun on March 22. Mishra said that during interrogation the accused revealed that they had come into contact with cybercriminals through the Telegram app. They were reportedly instructed to open current accounts under various business names in multiple banks. After opening these accounts, they collected related documents, including cheque books, passbooks, internet banking credentials, debit cards, and OTP-linked mobile numbers. These accounts were then linked to cybercriminals through an app and OTPs were forwarded using another app. These accounts were used for financial transactions linked to cyber frauds within India and internationally, Mishra said.
He informed that the accused received one per cent of the total transactions as payment in cryptocurrency which was stored in a Trust Wallet. They later sold this cryptocurrency at lower rates through Telegram channels to cyber fraudsters and converted it into Indian currency. The money was deposited into various accounts created by them and withdrawn as cash. They disclosed that they had earned approximately Rs 1.2 crore in profits over the past year, with Rs 25 lakh received in March 2025 alone, the DSP claimed. It was also revealed that Sandeep was an expert in opening corporate accounts.
Due to his skills, he was invited to Malaysia in mid-2024 to train other cybercriminals, Mishra said. Further investigations are underway to trace other individuals and financial networks involved in the operation, he added.
