Online Ponzi scam: Look-out circular issued against three more Chinese nationals including a woman

The Bureau of Immigration (BOI), Ministry of Home Affairs has issued Look Out Circular (LOC) against three more Chinese citizens, including a female, in connection with an online Ponzi scam. The LOC has been issued on the request of the Economic Offence Wing (EOW), Odisha which is investigating the case.

The LOC has been issued against Liu Huan, Wenhui Zheng and Xu Xiaolu. All the three are associates of Guanhua Wang, the mastermind of the scam.

As per the EOW, Guanhua Wan along with two other Chinese nationals (one male and one female) had come to India in 2019 and stayed in Bangalore for few months. They created at least three shell companies based in Bengaluru to run different cyber-financial scams.

On August 14, the EOW had arrested A Chitravel (31), who was the India Head of the Chinese scam, from Aviyur near Madurai, Tamilnadu in the mega online Chinese earning App/ Online Ponzi scam.

The Chinese nationals went back to China during the Covid pandemic. However, they were running the scam through Chitravel and some other such hired directors and facilitators. Chitravel allegedly used to get Rs 1 lakh per month to run the illegal operations in India.

Senior EOW officials said that the Chinese citizens had created at least 14 shell companies to run various cyber-financial frauds. Initially their focus was on ‘killer loan Apps” scam but after the government banned those apps they switched over to other frauds like earning apps, betting apps and others. Almost all the shell companies are based in Bengaluru.

In a statement, EOW informed that 85 bank accounts with transaction of crores of rupees have been detected. Apart from this, several Indian mobile numbers are still used by Chinese perpetrators from China, the statement read.