Fraudsters used 6,500 bank accounts to split Rs 58 crore they cheated from 72-year old Mumbai share trader and his wife to avoid money getting tracked

An official said that the 6,500 accounts that have been used in the fraud are all within the country. “In some cases, withdrawals have been made by fraudsters from a bank using a cheque to break the link of accounts across which the money has been transferred,” a senior official said.

The official added that after withdrawing the money by cheque, they deposit the money in another account of the same bank which is unlinked to the other accounts and thus, is not traced by cops.

“Earlier they would withdraw money from ATMs where we could identify them from the CCTV camera as it would be one person at one time. Now when we try checking bank CCTVs, it is outsourced to a third party and nabbing them becomes difficult. Even if we do, it becomes difficult to identify the accused as many people are present at one time in the bank,” the official said.

“As we learn about their various modus operandi, fraudsters too keep evolving their methods. After they realised we managed to block particular accounts, they used tricks like spreading the money across hundreds…or in this case thousands of accounts,” the official added.

He added that so far they have arrested five persons whose accounts were used or who used others bank accounts to move the money. “ Usually in digital arrest cases, we find that calls are made from countries like Laos and Cambodia while money is moved across accounts, converted into cryptocurrency and sent outside the country to the masterminds,” the official added.

In this particular case, the 72-year-old complainant was first called by the accused on August 19 who claimed to be from the ED and CBI. The accused told the complainant that there was “illegal funds” in his bank account and that they were placing him under digital arrest. The accused also sent some documents to prove that they were “genuine officers”.

The accused asked the complainant and his wife to transfer funds to their account so that they can verify the money was genuine following which they were told that the money would be transferred back to their accounts.

Between August 19 and October 8, the complainant and his wife transferred Rs 58.13 crore through RTGS to various bank accounts provided by the accused. The police found that the money was transferred through 18 bank accounts across Maharashtra and other states.

After Maharashtra cyber police was alerted about the scam, they began a probe and started looking through details of the various bank accounts where the money had been transferred.

Accordingly, they identified three mule account holders who had provided their accounts identified as Abdul Khulli (47) from Malad, Arjun Kadwasara (55) from Chira Bazaar and his brother Jetharam (35) from Mumbai Central who were placed under arrest on Wednesday. Four others were arrested on Thursday.

The cyber police are currently interrogating the accused to get some details about the main accused who carried out the scam.