By Biswanath Dash
BHUBANESWAR: During the Investigation of EOW Ps case No 10 dated 23.3.2023 u/s420/467/468/471/120 B IPC/ Sec 4,5&6 of PCMCS Banning Act , 6 OPID Act and66C & 66D of IT Act, the Investigating officer came through an advertisement in internet about an App by the name Join trade- Financial growth claiming to provide instant profit with minimal investment of money .Their advertisements morphed the Pictures of leading Bollywood actors like Akshay Kumar and Manish Paul,in order to mislead and instil trust in the Public. On further investigation, it came to surface that the fraudulent App by the name Join trade is downloadable in Google Play store and has 1 Lakh Plus downloads. The app is powered/ developed by Perfect Trade.
The App claims to be a professional financial trading and wealth management platform with different investment schemes with minimal deposit ofRs 100-20,000/-.During further enquiry, it came to surface that the amount can only be deposited through UPI’ID’s reflected in the APP which keeps changing constantly each minute and such ID’s were linked to savings Bank and current accounts maintained in the name of many shell companies / firms and individual persons. Layering was used for transacting the ill-gotten money by transferring the bulk credit amount to further unknown accounts maintained in the name of firms/companies and individuals. In the said enquiry, 5 number of accounts were scrutinized having a total transactions of Rs.18.67 crores.
Out of which, three accounts were maintained in the name of big firms/ companies based in Gujarat ,Rajasthan, and Delhi . It was further observed that all the above noted mule accounts which were opened in the name of individuals and companies were maintained mainly in YES Bank , ICICI Bank , HDFC Bank and IDFC First Bank .Enquiry revealed that the accounts were operated by the fraudsters mostly through internet Banking. During enquiry, a total amount of more than Rs 1.22 Crore was frozenby EOW from the above cited Bank accounts. EOW has also written Google to remove the App from Google Play Store.
