A 25-year-old man hailing from Uttar Pradesh was arrested in New Delhi for allegedly cheating several people by telling them that they had won online lottery, police said on Sunday.
Mohd Adil was arrested from central Delhi’s Ranjeet Nagar recently following investigations into a complaint filed by an ICICI bank official that one of his customers was defrauded.
Vivek Kishore, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central), said 14 ATM and credit cards of different banks, six PAN Cards and 11 cheque books of different banks were recovered from Adil.
According to the complaint, the customer was lured by by Adil into believing that he had actually won a lottery after which the victim deposited Rs 50,000 in a given account of ICICI bank as “processing fee” for claiming the lottery amount.
On the complaint of the customer, the bank alerted other branches of the bank to keep a watch on the said account number.
When Adil came to the Patel Nagar branch of the bank on June 30 to withdraw Rs 50,000 from his account, Mr. Kishore said, the bank officials confronted him about the source of funds coming into his account.
He was unable to explain and as a result both his accounts were frozen.
“We obtained the statements of the accounts and on scrutiny, it was learnt that huge transactions have been made in these accounts on regular basis and a large amount of money has been withdrawn by the account holder,” Mr. Kishore said.
A raid was conducted at the address of the account holder at Vishwas Nagar but the house was found locked, Mr. Kishore said, adding Adil was arrested later following further investigations.
“Adil told us that he is part of online lottery fraud racket in which they cheated gullible people luring them through e-mails that they had won substantial money through online lottery.
“Whenever any person would contact them on the given mail ID, they told that person to deposit some money in the name of service charges, processing fee etc. to win their confidence,” the DCP said.
As soon as the person would deposit money in the designated accounts, they would immediately withdraw the money. His accounts were also used for this purpose. They have cheated a number of people by this modus operandi, Mr. Kishore said.
Adil is unemployed. He came to Faridabad in Haryana about a year back in search of job, where he came in contact with the racket and shifted to a rented room in Delhi. He used to change his accommodation regularly.
