Balasore: The cyber cell of Balasore police have arrested five men in a Rs 12.45 lakh cyber fraud case.
Four accused were arrested from Jamtara, notorious as India’s ‘phishing capital’, in Jharkhand. The fifth accused was arrested from Sundargarh.
Those arrested are Samin Ahmad, Mohammad Ansari, Sajeed Iqbal, Niyaz Hussein and MD Rahil. The accused are from Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand.
The police seized Rs 1.69 lakh cash, 14 ATM cards of different banks, 39 SIM cards and 10 mobile phones from them.
They allegedly stole Rs 12.45 lakh from the bank account of Jyotsnarani Patra, a native of Baligohiri in Balasore. She had two FDs of Rs 5 lakh each and Rs 2.45 lakh in her savings account at an IndusInd Bank branch in Balasore, which the fraudsters took away.
The police found that the money had been transferred to several accounts in Kolkata, Bihar, Jharkhand and Sundargarh. The arrests were made after raids at multiple locations in West Bengal, Delhi, Mumbai and other areas, police said.
The cyber team of Crime Branch had recently arrested two members of the inter-state Jamtara gang from Odisha’s capital. The arrests revealed that the gang is active in Bhubaneswar also.
In 2020, the Commissionerate Police had released a video warning the people of Bhubaneswar of the gang’s activities. The video showed a gang member demanding the ATM number from a State Bank of India (SBI) customer and threatening him for not doing so.
The Jharkhand-based Jamtara gang operates across India. The gang’s criminal activities have been reported from Bharatpur in Rajasthan, Gurgaon in Haryana, Kolkata and Asansol in West-Bengal, and Varanasi and Jalapaur in Uttar Pradesh, sources said.
