Odisha: EOW Freezes Rs 1.22 Crore Of Ponzi App Using Morphed Pics Of Akshay Kumar

Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offences Wing has frozen Rs 1.22 crore of an app, Join trade- Financial growth, allegedly claiming to provide instant profit with minimal investment of money.

According to an EOW release, morphed pictures of leading Bollywood actors Akshay Kumar and Manish Paul were used in their advertisements to mislead and instil trust in the public. Investigation revealed that the fraudulent app had 1 lakh downloads in Google Play store. It claimed to be a professional financial trading and wealth management platform with different investment schemes with minimal deposit of Rs 100-20,000. The app was powered/developed by Perfect Trade.

The EOW later found that the amount can only be deposited through UPI IDs reflected in the app, which kept changing each minute and were linked to savings bank and current accounts maintained in the name of many shell companies/firms and individuals. Layering was used for transacting the ill-gotten money by transferring the bulk credit amount to further unknown accounts maintained in the name of firms/companies and individuals, it said.

Five accounts, having a total transactions of Rs 18.67 crore, were scrutinised and three of them were found to being maintained in the names of big firms/companies based in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi.

These mule accounts opened in the name of individuals and companies were maintained mainly in YES Bank , ICICI Bank , HDFC Bank and IDFC First Bank. Further inquiry revealed that the accounts were operated by the fraudsters mostly through internet banking.

Following the investigation, more than Rs 1.22 crore was frozen from these accounts. EOW has also written Google to remove the App from Google Play Store, it added.