Saturday, 21 January 2023 | PNS | DEHRADUN
Uttarakhand police in a joint operation with Maharashtra police busted a gang involved in extortion through dubious loan apps across the country on Thursday. The gang was allegedly running a call centre in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad district to extort money from victims of these dubious loan apps. The cyber crime police station of Uttarakhand Special Task Force (STF) started the investigation into the case after a Dehradun resident filed a complaint of being duped of Rs 17 lakh through one of such dubious loan apps. The deputy superintendent of police (DSP) of cyber crime, STF, Ankush Mishra informed that the STF found in its initial investigation that several victims of the State have also registered similar complaints in National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP) of the central government. The STF formed a special team and registered a case on the matter under sections 419, 420, 469, 500, 501, 504 of Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sections 43A, 66, 66(c), 66(d) of the IT Act on December 29. The special team has already taken the initiative to stop the operation of about 80 dubious loan apps. Besides this, the team has also marked about 70 SMS headers which are used to lure or trick people to use those dubious loan apps. Mishra said that STF is taking action to block these marked SMS headers all over the country. He said that the STF arrested an accused Ankur Dhingra from New Delhi last week for his alleged involvement in the scam. It was revealed during the investigation that the gang has been working to extort money from victims of dubious loan apps through a special series of 77 mobile numbers of Vodafone Company. It was further revealed on checking the numbers that 32 SIMs were ported and activated by the same company Yash Enterprises on October 4 last year, informed Mishra. He said that the STF team along with Maharashtra police conducted a raid in a call centre in Aurangabad district where 150 employees were working to extort money from the public through calls. The employees told the police that the owner of the company, Syed Zoheb used to give them tasks through various team leaders to extort money from people across the country. The DSP said that Zoheb had already fled the scene before police arrival and a look out circular will be issued against him soon. The police also recovered 1,500 SIM cards and two SIM box machines. The senior superintendent of police of STF, Ayush Agarwal said that such dubious loan apps were earlier available on the Play Store but after Google banned tem, cyber criminals started misleading the public by sending a link of the apps through WhatsApp, SMS and other means. He appealed to the public to refrain from clicking on such links or take online loans from any unregistered organisation.
