Two more held for siphoning off Rs 23 lakh from Patiala MP’s account

PATIALA: District police have made two more arrests in connection with a cyber crime targeting Patiala MP Preneet Kaur. The accused had siphoned off Rs 23 lakh from her bank account.
The police have arrested Afsgar Ali and Noor Ali, originally from Bihar but living in Mandi Gobindgarh in Fatehgarh Sahib district at present. The two were arrested late Wednesday evening. They, along with Ansari, who had been brought here from Jamtara, were produced before a local court at Patiala on Thursday and were sent to eight days police remand.
While investigating, the police came to know of the multi-layered operation that has been put in place by the accused to avoid detection. According to Patiala senior superintendent of police (SSP) M S Sidhu, the three arrested by the police had moved the money siphoned off from the MPs account into 23 online accounts of Spice India Company and then further into 28 e-wallets of PayTM before transferring the cash into a bank account operated by the gang.
In MP Kaur’s case, the accused had allegedly confessed that they had managed to make 23 online transactions by first using the OTP to replace the MP’s mobile number linked with her bank account with one of their own.
The three had also allegedly revealed that their job was to move the money into multiple e-wallets before transferring it to gang’s bank account. “Ansari has told his interrogators that he was not sure who had made the call to the Patiala MP identifying himself as Rahul Agarwal. It has come to light that there are hundreds of such callers operating from the deep woods of Jamtara. These callers randomly call people and fool them into giving their bank details,” Sidhu said.