Cybercrook making Rs 3 crore a day from scams arrested by Mumbai cops

MUMBAI: A class XII passout and a self-taught cybergeek has been arrested from Vishakhapatnam by the Bangur Nagar Police in a multi-crore cyberfraud spanning the length and breadth of the country. Shrinivas Rao Dadi, 49, was nabbed from a five-star hotel, where he had been hiding. Investigators said Dadi had been converting money, that was defrauded from Indian citizens, into cryptocurrency and transferring it to Chinese nationals. He was generating a turnover of anywhere between Rs 3 crore to 5 crore every day out of deceiving citizens. Four others associated with the crime have also been held.


Explaining the modus operandi, investigators said there was a hierarchy in how the scamsters operated. Some of them were tasked with calling up unsuspecting citizens, largely women, over Skype or WhatsApp posing as policemen. They would scare the victim by claiming that a parcel that he/ she had sent by courier was found to be containing drugs. They also flashed fake police IDs to deceive the victim. "The victims were conned into downloading apps that provided the scamster with remote access to their phone screen,” said DCP Ajay Bansal. The victims were then coerced into entering their bank account details on the phone. Once the victim keyed in the details, the fraudster viewed them through the app and emptied their account.
Citizens were duped in this manner in Mumbai, Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata among other places. In the Delhi incident, the fraudster had made a video call to the victim dressed in a khaki uniform.
"We first learnt of these incidents in March and immediately started to investigate as the scamsters were assuming identities of senior officers in the Mumbai Police force to deceive victims," said assistant inspector Vivek Tambe, Bangur Nagar police. The police probe was based heavily on technical inputs and took nearly a month and a half. During this time, the police team camped in at least four different cities.
The money defrauded from victims was going into bank accounts operated by certain agents. Two of them, Mahendra Rokde and Mukesh Dive, were held from Titwala while two others, Sanjay Mandal and Animesh Vaid, were nabbed from Kolkata.
Police then learnt that a large number of bank accounts were being operated across the country to receive defrauded money. The agents would communicate with Dadi, who was their handler, over Telegram app. Dadi was converting the ill-gotten money into cryptocurrency and transferring it to Chinese nationals, according to the police. Dadi fled from his home in Hyderabad and hid in Vishakhapatnam where he was nabbed from a five-star hotel. Police have frozen a sum of Rs 1.5 crore from 40 bank accounts. Dadi had transferred Rs 25 lakh into his wife's bank account and police are probing if Dadi's family is involved in the crime as well.
"Dadi was a former security officer by profession. He has been involved in cybercrime for the past three to four years but was never under the police radar," said Bansal. Police have seized his gadgets and found evidence such as text messages on his iPhone.
"The case has disclosed inter-state linkages," said joint commissioner, law and order, Satyanarayan Chaudhary.
Watch How a man defrauded people posing as police and ran a multi-crore cyber fraud