Wan Chenghua A team of sleuths from various Central investigating agencies on Tuesday landed at Chandigarh Sector 17’s cyber cell police station to interrogate Chinese national Wan Chenghua, who was arrested along with 20 others, by the cyber cell for allegedly extorting money from people after trapping them through small easy loan lending applications.
Wan Chenghua and the 20 other arrested accused were on Monday remanded in four days of police custody.
According to details available, teams from the Intelligence Bureau (IB), National Investigation Agency (NIA), and Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) visited Chandigarh Police’s cyber cell police station here on Monday and questioned Wan Chenghua, who was arrested from Greater Noida on Monday.
Chenghua, a resident of Wuhan in China, had traveled to India in 2019 on a work visa, that said that he was a chef.
Chenghua’s visa had expired in 2021, however, he continued to live in India illegally.
Sources said that officers from various Central agencies grilled Chenghua both jointly and independently, in the presence of a Chinese language interpreter, on Monday for several hours, during which they determined that the man was not very fluent in English.
“He has acknowledged that he was aware of the fact that his work visa had expired in 2021. He claimed that he had come to India on the basis of his expertise in cooking,” an officer said.
Sources maintained that intelligence agencies are yet to procure the exact name of the company which had issued Wan Chenghua his work visa.
Chengua is suspected to have come to India through the medium of a construction company.
“An amount of Rs 17.31 lakh was recovered from the Chinese national and two others on Monday. The money was meant to pay the salaries of 18 people who had been hired to work as agents, and team leaders under Chenghua as well as Anshul Kumar and Parvej Alam, alias Jeetu Bhadana — all of who were involved in managing the domains of online loan applications,” Superintendent of Police (cyber cell) Ketan Bansal said. Parvez Alam had been nabbed from Ranchi in Jharkhand by a cyber cell team during the course of a ten-day operation.
Police said that Wan Chenghua, Anshul Kumar and Parvej Alam had recruited 13 accused as agents/telephone callers and five others as team leaders/managers.
All of the arrested men were taught how to use force, blackmail and threats to get people to return the money that had been loaned through the apps.
According to details, the raids by the cyber cell of Chandigarh Police were conducted in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Delhi, and Rajasthan over a period of ten days in connection to two FIRs that had been lodged by two Chandigarh residents — Arvind Kumar and Vinit Kumar.