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The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) Bhubaneswar has busted another online Ponzi scam by arresting three fraudsters from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. The accused have been identified as Sachin Pal, Ankush Singh and Kuldeep.
The trio was arrested based on the complaint filed by one Parthasarathi Pattnaik against a digital marketing channel which was registered as www.r46.in.
The complainant had alleged that the digital marketing channel was cheating the general public on the pretext of providing extra income through digital marketing. The complainant Parthasarathi had initially received a WhatsApp message and later came in contact with a person who influenced him to create an account on the above website.
The person asked Parthasarathi to purchase items virtually on the website for which he would be getting some lucrative commission of 15% to 20% on the product price.
As per reports, Parathasarathi had invested Rs 6.5 lakh and his total commission along with invested amount was being reflected as Rs.7.31 lakhs in the wallet of the website. The fraud came to light after the complainant was not able to withdraw the amount.
How Fraud Happened
The website had a telegram channel “eBay Official work channel No.7” with a rolling subscriber base of more than 65 thousand members.
The fraudsters have developed a fake website i.e. www.r46.in for digital marketing and used to contact the general public through Whatsapp.
People were asked to log in the website for extra income in through commission of 15-20% for buying digitally any kind of products from leading websites like e-bay.com, amazon, shopee, zomato, paypal, google, phonepe, flipkart etc. For this, the fraudsters told them to create a wallet with the website and then link the wallet with the bank account in order to recharge or withdraw the money.
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.
EOW Findings
The website www.r46.in is a fake website developed by fraudsters who are reportedly managing from outside India. The victims were asked to log in to the website and to purchase the product virtually from renowned websites. They were 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.
“The arrested accused Sachin Pal and Ankush Singh, both have the educational qualification of B-Com, had let their bank accounts to be hired for consideration of some thousands of rupees to be used for transaction ill-gotten money,” said EOW.
Kuldeep, who is an agent of the fraudsters, used to hire the bank accounts to hand over those to the fraudsters operating from Rajasthan for the illegal channelization of money for a monthly remuneration of Rs.30,000.
