Arrested after 500-km chase: How a Delhi Police team caught a digital fraud accused near China border

The racket was operating from China, said police, and Khan’s arrest — after a 500-km hunt from Guwahati — eventually happened in Tawang.

The racket had come on the police radar just weeks before when Diwakar Jha (45), a retired Air Force personnel and a resident of South West Delhi’s Sagarpur area, claimed that he was duped.

“Diwakar retired about two years ago, and was living with his wife and their two children,” a police officer said. His wife is suffering from paralysis, and most of his time went into caring for her and the children, police said, adding that he often felt lonely.

“Last November, he made his profile on a matrimony website. He was not looking to remarry, but he saw no harm in talking to a woman for sometime and seeing how it goes,” a police officer said.

At the start of December, Jha matched with a woman named Prachi. “They got along well. Prachi even discussed possible future prospects, and said they would need money to settle together as he was retired. The conversation then moved on to an investment scheme from where she claimed to have earned good returns,” the officer said.

Marriage was not on Jha’s mind, but money was. Intrigued, he agreed to join a WhatsApp group that Prachi was part of. Initially, he was asked to deposit Rs 80,000 in an account whose details were sent to him. Jha made a decent profit in two days. “He then made another deposit of Rs 30,000 into another bank account. In the days that followed, he made his final deposit of Rs 6 lakh 50 thousand in a third account in the first week of January,” the officer added.
With no profits, he was now worried about the money and reached out to Prachi.  By January 12, Prachi stopped replying to Jha’s anxious messages and she was eventually unreachable, officers said. He realised he was conned.
“Jha filed a complaint with the Delhi Police. Prachi’s number was traced, and it was found that it was being operated from Cambodia. One of the accounts in which he transferred money was found linked to a phone number registered in Assam’s Dispur,” said one of the investigators.

The number was that of Mantu Sutradhar (23), who worked at a restaurant in Guwahati. Soon, another account was tracked to Pranav Talukdar (31),  who ran a water supply business in the same city.

Police joined the dots.  “A team, led by Sub-Inspector Amit, and supervised by Inspector SHO Parvesh (Cyber) and DCP (Southwest) Amit Goel, reached Dispur on January 26.  The two were chased down before being arrested in Guwahati,” another investigator said.

As the duo were questioned separately, they said that they had just sold their bank accounts to the common man — Khan.

Officers found Khan was unemployed. Over the past year, he had joined Telegram groups where mule accounts were bought and sold by cyber fraudsters from across South East Asia.

“The bank accounts were ‘tested’ through APK files for their authenticity. After testing, the access of the accounts
was transferred to the administrators of the Telegram groups. For each account , and the money came to it, the seller
was given a commission in their crypto wallets,” a police officer said.

On January 27, a three-member team — led by a sub-inspector with the Cyber police station of the Capital’s South West district — started chasing Khan, who was moving towards Bomdila Pass in Arunachal Pradesh.

By January 28, as the police team camped in Bomdila, Khan got to know he was being chased. “Someone sent him the pictures of Pranav and Minto, standing with police officers in court, and he had seen all our faces,” another officer said.

He went higher up the mountains towards Tawang.

The Scorpio of the police team entered the freezing Tawang on the night of January 31 after a 500- km hunt.
“We got a tip about a car in which he was travelling. We traced the car to a shabby hotel, and nabbed him there,”  one of the team members said.

The whole night, the police officers questioned Khan at the Tawang police station. He was produced in a court the next day.