How a complaint of cyber theft worth Rs 25,000 led Ahmedabad police to recovery of Rs 3.16 crore

On August 8, a man filed an application on the NCCRP that Rs 24,988 were withdrawn from several of his bank accounts in a fraudulent manner through Google Pay without him even providing an OTP to approve these transactions.

The Paldi police began an investigation and followed the money trail from one layer to another as the cash kept changing bank accounts. At the third layer, the police found that money had been withdrawn in large amounts through self-cheques through a bank in Ahmedabad itself, the police said in a statement.

The police then, through the search of those who had collected the cash from the bank, found six men who had withdrawn Rs 3.18 crore but couldn’t explain the source of the money in their possession, according to the statement.

Arifkhan Akbarkhan Makrani, Ashwinkumar Natwarlal Patel, Smit Satishchandra Chavda, Rakesh Savaram Prajapati, Jagdish Kumar Mahendra Patel and Jasmeet Raju Khambaliya were booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) sections 318(2) and 61(2), as well as under 66(c) of the Information Technology (IT) Act, and placed under arrest.

The police seized Rs 3.16 crore in cash, 15 mobile phones, three cheques and nine cheque books from them.

Further investigation led the police to find a total of 136 applications against the second-layer bank accounts. When they went a step further, they found a total of 518 complaint applications against the third-layer bank accounts through which Rs 23.23 crore worth of transactions had taken place. Of this amount, at least Rs 9.68 crore are suspected to be proceeds of crime, police said.

Further investigation is underway.