Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) here has arrested three persons from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, in connection with an online Ponzi fraud by a digital marketing channel, www.r46.in, in Odisha.
According to EOW release, the tri0 – Sachin Pal, Ankush Singh and Kuldeep- were nabbed on basis of a complaint lodged by one Parthasarathi Pattnaik, alleging that he was cheated by the channel after being promised extra earnings through digital marketing.
After receiving a WhatsApp message, Parthasarathi Pattnaik came in contact with a person who asked him to create an account in the website and purchase items virtually. He was promised lucrative commission of 15% to 20% on the product price. He invested Rs.6.5 lakh through this website, and his total commission along with invested amount was reflected as Rs.7.31 lakh in the wallet of the website. When he wanted to withdraw the amount, the same was not allowed.
The website had a telegram channel “eBay Official work channel No.7” with a rolling subscriber base of more than 65,000 members. It was found that the fraudsters had developed the fake website i.e. www.r46.in for digital marketing and used to contact people through WhatsApp, asking them to log into the website for extra income through 15-20% commission on buying digitally any kind of products from the leading websites like e-bay.com, amazon, shopee, zomato, paypal, google, phonepe, flipkart. They had to create a wallet with the website and then link it with the bank account to recharge or withdraw the money. The could recharge through UPI IDs only given in the website. Once the wallet is recharged, the tutor of the fake website would assign some task to buy products online through different websites by depositing the amount. Once the victim completed the task, the wallet showed the total amount accrued to the buyer. Seeing the amount growing day by day in the wallet, the victims were tempted to invest more. But found the withdrawal facility blocked when they tried to withdraw the amount, the release said.
The money ultimately landed in different mule accounts hired by the fraudsters. They used hundreds of shell companies/mule accounts to make a complex layer of money transaction and finally they misappropriated the amount.
Sachin Pal and Ankush Singh, both commerce graduates, let their bank accounts to be hired for transaction of the ill gotten money. They hand over their SIM cards linked to the accounts to Kuldeep, who is an agent of the fraudsters having the educational qualification of MCA. He used to hire bank accounts and hand over those to the fraudsters operating from Rajasthan for the illegal transaction of money for a monthly remuneration of Rs.30,000.
The EOW also found that Rs.3.32 lakh and Rs.1.5 lakh were illegally transacted from the amount deposited by Parthasarathi Pattnayak. The mobile phones of the accused persons containing many incriminating materials have been seized.
The investigation further revealed that fraudsters had cheated thousands of innocent people throughout the country and the fraud amount runs into crores of rupees. The website www.r46.in was also found to be fake and it was reportedly managed from outside the country, the release added.
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