By Biswanath Dash
BHUBANESWAR: The Odisha Police Economic Offences Wing arrested 3 accused persons namely Sachin Pal, Ankush Singh and Kuldeep from Vijaynagar PS area, Ghaziabad of Uttar Pradesh on 28.04.2023 in connection with EOW PS Case No-22 dated 13-12-2022 U/s 419/420/467/468/471/120-B IPC,r/w Sec.66 (C) & (D) of IT Act, 2000. After arrest, accused persons were produced before the Hon’ble Court of CJM, Ghaziabad and were brought to Bhubaneswar on 03 days transit remand for their production before the Hon’ble Court of SDJM, Bhubaneswar.
The above noted case was registered consequent upon an enquiry made on the allegation of one Parthasarathi Pattnaik against a digital marketing channel registered as www.r46.in that was cheating the general public in the name of giving extra income through digital marketing. After receiving a whatsapp message the above named Parthasarathi Pattnaik came in contact with a person who induced him to create an account in the above website and also to purchase items virtually on the website for which he would be getting some lucrative commission of 15% to 20% on the product price.
Being induced, he invested Rs.6.5 Lakhs through this website, and his totalcommission along with invested amount was being reflected as Rs.7.31 lakhs in the walletof the website. But, when he wanted to withdraw the amount, the same was not allowed.The website had a telegram channel “eBay Official work channel 7” with a rollingsubscriber base of more than 65 thousand members.It was found that the fraudsters have developed the fake website i.e.www.r46.in for digital marketing and used to contact the general public throughwhatsapp inducing them to log in the website for extra income in way of commission of15-20% for buying digitally any kind of products from the leading websites like e-bay.com,amazon, shopee, zomato, paypal, google, phonepe, flipkart etc. for which they have tocreate an wallet with the website and then link the wallet with the bank account in order to recharge or withdraw the money. The recharge should be made through UPI IDs onlygiven in the website. Once the wallet is recharged, the tutor of the fake website wouldassign some task i.e. to buy virtually the products through different websites by depositing the cost thereof. Once the victim buyer completes the task by depositing the amount towards the cost of the product, the wallet of the website will show the total amount accrued to the buyer. Seeing the amount growing day by day in the wallet for every e-buying, the victim buyer gets induced to invest more. But, when the victim tries to withdraw the amount will find the withdrawal facility has been blocked. In this way, the fraudsters have cheated thousands of innocent people throughout the country andthe fraud amount runs in Crores.
It was found on investigation, the website www.r46.in is a fake websitedeveloped by the fraudsters which is reportedly managed from outside Nations. In orderto cheat the general public in the name of giving extra income, they do ask the innocent victims to log in to the website and to purchase the product virtually of renowned websites, they are asked to recharge the wallet by transferring the amount through given UPI IDs. The money ultimately lands in different mule accounts hired by the fraudsters for some minimal amounts. They used hundreds of shell companies/mule accounts to make a complex layer of money transaction and finally they misappropriated the amount.
The arrested accused Sachin Pal and Ankush Singh, both have the educational qualification of B-Com. let their bank accounts to be hired for consideration of some thousands of rupees to be used for transaction ill-gotten money. They hand over their Sim cards linked to the accounts to accused Kuldeep, who is an agent of the fraudsters having the educational qualification of M.C.A. He used to hire the bankaccounts to further hand over those to the fraudsters operating from Rajasthan for the illegal channelization of money for a monthly remuneration of Rs.30,000/- .As found Rs.3.32 lakhs and Rs.1.5 lakhs have illegal been transacted fromthe amount deposited by the victim Parthasarathi Pattnayak.During investigation, the mobile phones of the accused persons containing many incriminating materials have been seized.The investigation of the case is on.
