Hyderabad: Busted e-commerce fraud gang uses advanced techniques

The gang arrested by Cyberabad Cybercrime police had quite a sophisticated modus operandi, which included tele-calling centres in Odisha and Jharkhand, with Telugu speaking tele-callers to lure people from AP and TS

Hyderabad: Sitting far away in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, this gang swindled over Rs 2 crore by making people in the Telugu speaking States scratch fake gift cards.

That was not all. This e-commerce fraud gang, arrested by the Cyberabad Cybercrime police on Monday, had quite a sophisticated modus operandi, which included tele-calling centres in Odisha and Jharkhand, with Telugu speaking tele-callers to lure people from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, while there were Kannada and Tamil speaking callers to dupe people in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu as well.

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The 10 persons arrested included five from Mancherial in Telangana, with the primary charge against them being cheating people by sending fake gift scratch cards and application letters in the name of popular e-commerce and telemarketing companies.

The arrested were identified as Tarun Kumar from Bihar, Prabhakar Kumar Sinha from Jharkhand, Kamlesh Dubey from Mancherial, Yashwanth Thakur from Madhya Pradesh, Sourabh Patel from Madhya Pradesh, M Venkatesh, G Rakesh, E Prashanth, S Rajender Reddy and L Rajalingu, all from Ranchi and natives of Mancherial. Five suspects, Alok, Tiranju and Bajrangi from Bihar and Kotesh and Sunil from Jharkhand, were absconding.

Addressing a press conference, Cyberabad Commissioner VC Sajjanar said Tarun Kumar collected the database of customers of different popular e-commerce websites from Alok and Tiranju and prepared fake envelopes on the name of these companies and sent scratch cards to the customers by post.

“Customers believed the letters to be genuine, as they had purchased some product or the other from these online e-commerce companies. They fell into the trap and called the fraudsters on the mobile phone numbers given in the post received by them to confirm winning gifts including cars and costly gadgets among others,” Sajjanar said.

The fraudsters, on receiving these calls, would send fake ID cards of e-commerce companies on WhatsApp to convince the customer. “Once any of the customers believed them, they would start extracting money under the pretext of registration fee, document charges, GST and Income Tax to claim gifts,” Sajjanar said, adding that the police had seized 42 mobile phones, laptops, rubber stamps and 30 debit cards from the gang.

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