Three held for swindling Rs 49 lakh in alleged cyber crime

In a suspected cyber crime, three persons have been arrested for allegedly hacking the mobile phone of a district resident and transferring a sum of Rs 49 lakh from her bank account to their fake accounts,police said today.
The trio, identified as Krishnakumar Mishra, a resident of Bihar's Siwana district, Satishkumar Yadav, hailing from West Bengal's Kakinada city and Raja Bhattachariya, a resident of Kolkata, was arrested on Friday, police said.
The victim, Priyanka Chandrashekhar Deshmukh, had alleged in her complaint to Wadgaon Road police that her mobile phone was hacked and an amount of Rs 49 lakh was transferred from her bank account to another, Wadgaon Road Police Station Officer Balkrishna Jadhav said.

A four-member team of police officials, led by Assistant Police Inspector (API) Santosh Kendre, has been sent to Kolkata to identify the arrested accused and search other members of the gang, he said.
Preliminary investigation suggests that the gang members roam around in the labourer-dominated colonies in Kolkata and along Bangladesh border, from where they collect the photo identity cards, ration cards, Aadhar cards and photos of susceptible labourers under the pretext that they would be given government assistance under various schemes, he said.
The accused also give paltry money to the labourers in the first instance after taking them into confidence, he said.

Later, these identity proofs would be used to purchase sim cards from companies, mainly Vodafone. With the help of the sim cards, they would hack the data of the victims and later transfer the sum as per the balance in the accounts, he said.

Some of the gang members have opened fake bank accounts in the names of the labourers, mainly in ICICI Bank, in Yavatmal. They have so far opened hundreds of such bogus bank accounts in Kolkata, New Delhi and Nagaland, the police official said.
The Yavatmal police team visited the addresses in Kolkata as per the bank statements and found that none of them was genuine, he said.

The police suspect the offence to be the handiwork of a mastermind R K alias Ravikumar, a resident of Bhadravati city, who was in September arrested by the Nagpur police for allegedly transferring Rs 30 lakh from an account in a similar modus operandi, he said.
"We cannot dispense with the details at this juncture of the investigation. They would be disclosed after getting a concrete proof of the cyber crime," he said.
A case has been registered against the three accused, he said, adding further investigation is on.