E-publishing scam: Police arrests female staff of fraud agency

Bhubaneswar: The Kharvel Nagar police today arrested and court-forwarded a female staff of the IQBS agency for her alleged involvement in duping people of crores of rupees in the name of providing e-publishing jobs.

The arrested has been identified as Urbasi, executive official of the IQBS agency.

Earlier this month, the Commissionerate had arrested retired Navy officer Nrusingh Prasad Patnaik in this connection. Police said search is on to nab other accused, who are absconding.

It is alleged that the APS Solutions and IQBS firms have cheated people in the name of digitisation of various novels. The firms used to ask third parties to submit security deposits for the e-publishing work. They were asked to scan pages of novels and offered a price of Rs 10 per page. Some of them were given 10,000 to 50,000 pages to scan and in return promised lakhs of rupees. The depositors were asked to submit the e-books or the scanned pages in PDF format either in pen drives, hard disks or DVDs. People invested up to Rs 6 lakh as security deposit for the e-book jobs.

In the first few months, they received lucrative remuneration for their deposits which lured them to invest more to get more work and subsequently to get more money. However, the companies shut down their operations after getting a hefty amount in crores as security deposits and then disappeared.