Bengaluru cyber criminals had access to more than 16,000 bank accounts

Agencies

Bengaluru: The Cyber Crime Police in the city have unearthed a huge internet scam. They have arrested four engineering college dropouts for their involvement in the scam called ’Bottom fishing’.

 

The cyber criminals have cheated several people not just in the state but across the nation as well. But the victims avoided approaching the police since the amount they lost was pretty low.

 

The police have identified the victims as Kapil Dev Suman, his brother Sushil Kumar Suman, Sooraj Kumar and Biplav Kumar. They are all natives of Bokaro steel City. As of today, the police have recovered 460 SIM cards, 15 mobiles, laptops, hard disks, data cards and forged and original identity proof documents.

 

The accused further more had a database consisting of details and credentials of more than 16,000 bank accounts. One of the accused also had some 600 domain names of various websites in his name. Some of the websites identified were www.munafaperday.com, munafadaily.com, paymaza.com, future trade.biz and mudratrade.com.

 

On one such website, the accused had advertised that expensive goods will be available at cheap rates. Gullible customers would fall for these websites and enter their banking credentials which were later captured by the accused. This information was then used by the accused to transfer money from the victim’s account to theirs.

 

Police got to know about the scam when an individual Suresh Sakri, a local resident filed a complaint stating that two transactions of RS. 5,000 and Rs. 2,000 were illegally debited from his account. During investigations, the police found that the money was transferred to an SBI bank account at JP Nagar. This account was activated without following the standard KYC procedures.

 

The said bank account was held in the name of Ajay Singh. When Kapil Dev Suman went to withdraw money, he was questioned. Verification revealed that the photograph on the account opening form of Ajay Singh was actually that of Kapil. Further investigations by the police led to the identification of over 28 bank accounts, one laptop, two mobile phones and four forged PAN cards.

 

The police formed three teams to conduct the investigations. The probe team was headed by DySP MD Sharath, and the team included Krishnoji Rao, Shafiullah, Vinod Kumar and Muniratnam.