4 who extorted money under guise of giving loans via Chinese app held

Police said the accused, Deepak, Sakshi Sethia, Ankit Kumar and Divyansh Kumar, had been running fake call centres in Gurgaon and Noida, and added that the gang had been active in Gurgaon since July 2021 and had disbursed micro loans to over 1 lakh people across the country.

Police said the accused worked as shareholders, dummy directors and management staff in the company. Police said probe found that they had been employed as ‘dummy directors’ for the purposes of registering the company, whose actual head is a Chinese person based abroad, and in the garb of providing loans, the accused were allegedly running call centres to extort money from people by harassing them.

Police said the victims took loans from an app after seeing ads on social media, after which they would get calls from unknown numbers. The accused would take personal details and harass users to extort money. Since they had access to the victims’ contact list, they would threaten to send morphed photos to relatives.

Gurgaon police commissioner Kala Ramachandran said, “The modus operandi used by the accused was to provide small loans to needy persons. Then they used to recover the loan amount from the victims by charging a high rate of interest and processing fee. On non-payment, they used to harass the victims and their family, friends and relatives by using abusive and threatening language and sending obscene vulgar/morphed pictures of the victims to their family, friends and relatives to extort money.”

Police said the accused were taken on remand for three days “Investigation is on to nab other accused. We will investigate how many people were conned by the gang,” said the commissioner.