Six cyber fraudsters held from four states; accounts flagged in three dozen cases of over Rs 100 crore

Over the past three weeks, the teams arrested a total of six cybercriminals in a coordinated operation. The details of the same were shared with the media on Wednesday. All the six suspects are currently in police custody. Police have identified the suspects as Mohammed Amer Akil Mohammed Arif (35), a real estate dealer based out of Hyderabad, Jigar Jitesh Patel (23), who works at the office of a Chartered Accountant in Mumbai, Ajith Vijayan (36), who runs a travel agency at Thiruvananthapuram, Sachin P Prakash (26), a security guard from Karnataka, Mohammed Rihan Mohammed Tajmul (18), a BSc student from Mysore and Sayyed Owaiz Afnan Sayyed Shaukat (20), a fruit seller from Mysuru.

Investigations have revealed that the mule accounts registered in the name of some of these suspects and accounts managed by some others as mule handlers have seen fraudulent transactions worth over Rs 100 crore. These accounts have been flagged in at least 35 cases of cyber frauds registered across the country including those in Mumbai, Karnataka, Telangana and Kerala. “The accounts used and managed by Mohammed Amer Akil Mohammed Arif have been flagged in the Rs 58 crore ‘digital arrest’ scam registered in Mumbai, the biggest ever fraud of the type registered in the country so far,” an officer who is part of the probe said.

Officials have expressed concern that despite extensive awareness campaigns and sensitisation efforts by the government and law enforcement agencies, incidents of digital arrest, online extortion and blackmail continue to be reported. These scams are typically carried out by cyber criminals impersonating officials from law enforcement agencies such as the police, CBI, Narcotics Department, RBI, and Enforcement Directorate and judges.

Such frauds have been serious enough to be flagged at the highest levels, including by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ address last year. As previously reported by Express, these scams are orchestrated by complex, multilayered syndicates operating across borders with their lowest layers of mule accounts and account handlers operating from within India. Victims’ money is often funnelled into mule accounts and then routed to international cybercrime networks through cryptocurrency channels.