Petrol pumps turn ATMs for cyber crooks

Hot on the chase of fraudsters following a complaint of cheating by a city resident, officials of the cyber crime cell in Ahmedabad landed at a call centre in Delhi and arrested eight persons. While most part of the modus operandi was familiar, what shocked the cops was the way the fraudsters encashed the money. They would route the money from bank accounts to petrol pumps and get cash from them. According to cops, this is probably for the first time that they have come across involvement of petrol pumps in such frauds.

As petrol pumps have daily RTGS and cashless transactions in huge amount, it was easy for these fraudsters to show their transactions in the petrol pump account, and then collect cash from them. The case came to light when Behrampura resident Jayesh Parmar lodged a complaint of cheating with cyber crime cell against callers who identified themselves as representatives from Bajaj Finance. He claimed he was asked to deposit money for insurance and security deposit if he wanted a loan of Rs 9 lakh. Convinced by their talks, he deposited the money in the account number provided, only later realising he had been cheated.

Cops traced the mobile location to Delhi. A team of nearly 20 personnel nabbed eight people from Tilaknagar in Delhi. They were identified as Bhupinder Sehgal (23), Bhupendra Kaushik (26), Rishi Kamal Dhingra (39), Mohammad Arif Ahmed Ali (20), Rajiv Kumar (27), Hani Kushwah (23), Manjitsingh Kaide (42) and Aftab Majharhusain Alam (28) from Delhi. Aftab and Manjit were team leaders. The search for the masterminds -Shadab, Rohit, Arun Bharti, call centre owner Vijay Dhavan and team leader Ajay Puri is on. Police also arrested 22 girls who were hired to contact customers. All are currently out on bail. They seized 67 mobile phones, 3 laptops, 5 Bank passbooks and cheque books, 1 router, 1 pen drive and 10 data registers.

Police say that Dhavan's average monthly bank transaction was around Rs 20 lakh . PI V B Barad from cyber cell said, "We have so far came across 28 bank accounts which were used to do transactions. Investigation is on. Daily transactions in these accounts ranged from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh."

Rajdeepsinh Zala, DCP, Cyber Cell, said, "This is probably for the first time where cyber fraudsters have used such a ploy. Two petrol pumps have been identified in Delhi and further investigation is on. Money in wallet and bank accounts was transferred to petrol pump account and then cash was recovered from them."

Gang had 10 GB data of people

The callers would take details of gullible customers and forward the same to the team leaders. They got paid Rs 8,000 per month, besides 1% incentive.

Police recovered 10 GB of excel sheet data from them. They believe that such huge data would contain crores of account details. The data includes names of victims, their bank account numbers, job designation, nature of business, their identity, address proof, salary, etc. Police have provided details of the arrests to adjoining states like MP, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and others as the racket had victims from these states as well.