Aishwarya Rai, Alia Bhatt and a credit card fraud

During investigation, police said IP addresses of the accused and mobile numbers used to set up bank accounts in the celebrities’ names were tracked and it was revealed that the scam was carried out by gangs in Delhi and Jaipur.

Raids were carried out and one Sunil Kumar was held from Babarpur. During interrogation, he disclosed that he allegedly got a forged Aadhaar and PAN card made from a shop owned by one Puneet and Md Asif.

He disclosed that he learnt the techniques of the scam from Vishva Bhaskar Sharma, whom he met on social media, who further introduced him to Pankaj Mishra, who allegedly impersonated Amitabh Bachchan.

Vishva Bhaskar, Pankaj, Puneet, and Md Asif were later arrested. Police said they revealed that till date, they have allegedly duped several loan apps and banks to the tune of Rs 90 lakh to 1 crore by faking their identity.

JCP (Eastern Range) Chhaya Sharma said three of the accused, Sunil, Vishva and Pankaj, worked in close conspiracy with each other. She said Vishva was the technical hand, with his BTech background from Rajasthan Technical University, and was on several Telegram groups and YouTube channels from where he learnt how to commit fraud with credit card companies and loan apps by editing personal identities of PAN card and Aadhaar card of people with a good CIBIL score.

“Thereafter, he came in touch with accused Sunil Kumar and Pankaj Mishra through the Telegram group. Sunil, Pankaj and Vishva took advantage of the lacuna in the KYC process adopted by the bank and cheated multiple banks, credit card companies and loan apps and divided the share equally… There was extensive use of social engineering to obtain PAN cards of celebrities using GST numbers and personal bank details. They then faked the IDs with original details to bypass the digital and even video KYC systems,” the JCP said.

An officer said the accused used to get GST details of celebrities from Google. “They were aware that the first two digits of GSTIN are the state code and the next 10 digits comprise the PAN number… Many celebrities’ GSTINs are available on the internet, so is their date of birth. PAN and the birth date complete the PAN card details,” the officer said.

He added that they fraudulently got the PAN cards made by putting their own pictures on it during verification to match the identity card and tapped the good CIBIL score to get the credit cards issued.