OTP-Sharing Scam: Arrested Odisha ITI Teacher Had Links With ISI Agent Nabbed In Bengal

Bhubaneswar: The ITI teacher among three arrested by STF of Odisha Crime Brach for procuring pre-activated SIM cards and selling OTPs to Pakistani intelligence operatives, allegedly had links with an ISI agent nabbed from Siliguri in West Bengal last year.

Pathanisamant Lenka (36), who was a teacher in an industrial training institute, was in direct contact with one Guddu Kumar and went into hiding after the latter was arrested by West Bengal Special Task Force in December last year for passing on sensitive information, including photographs of certain strategic locations in north Bengal, to his handlers in Pakistan. “Lenka fled to Hyderabad and returned to his native place, Itamati in Nayagarh districts, after two months. He was put under STF surveillance for his alleged links with Kumar,” J N Pankaj told a national daily.

The STF had on Sunday ascertained Lenka’s link with a Patna-based woman, who was arrested by Rajasthan police recently for her alleged ties with some Pakistani agents. The agency has also written to National Payments Corporation of India to share details of the bank accounts in which Lenka and his two aides – Saroj Nayak (26) and Soumya Pattnaik (19) – received money through Unified payments interface systems (UPI). “We have also requested WhatsApp and Facebook to share some details about the chats,” Pankaj said.

While STF is coordinating with Bengal to get to the roots of the racket, sleuths of central agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau, are likely to visit Bhubaneswar to interrogate the trio, who, investigation revealed, had full knowledge of the nationality of those whom they sold the OTPs and mule bank accounts, sources said.

The accused had procured huge numbers of pre-activated SIM cards in the names of fictitious people and the phone numbers and OTPs were used for opening online bank accounts, banking transactions, online purchases and creating social media handle to carry out anti-national activities like spying, communication with terrorists, radicalisation, running anti-India propaganda, fuelling anti-India/divisive sentiments, sextortion and honey-trapping. The objective of the foreign agents was to give an impression to the people that the accounts were of Indians but they were actually operated from Pakistan, the STF said.