Three members of a gang were arrested for allegedly sending fake police notices to Internet users asking them to pay a fine of ₹3,000 for watching pornographic content, which was an illegal activity, the police said on Monday.
Arrested from T.N.
Three accused, Gabrial James, Ram Kumar Selvam and B. Dhinushanth, were all arrested from Tamil Nadu by a team of Delhi Police’s Cyber Cell where they operated on the behest of their mastermind, B. Chanderkant, who is based out of Cambodia, South-East Asia and accused Dhinushanth’s brother, the police said.
A probe was initiated after a few people reported on social media about a purported police notice issued to them alleging they were watching pornography which is a banned activity, hence all the files in their computer were blocked.
The victims also added that they were only doing routine searches on their web browser and had not searched for any pornographic content.
DCP (Cyber Cell) Anyesh Roy said: “Action was initiated suo moto after registration of an FIR on the basis of social media inputs. The technical analysis of bogus pop-up notices showed that they were being routed through foreign locations.”
However, the money trail led to multiple accounts operating from Tamil Nadu. Accordingly, a team was despatched to Tamil Nadu. Since, the fraudster’s used bogus addresses for opening accounts, the team camped in the region for over a week and travelled over 2,000 km between Chennai, Trichi, Coimbatore, Udhagamandalam, and several other places to finally apprehend three men, including the local mastermind, B. Dhinushanth.”
When Dhinushanth was questioned, he told the police that the technical part of the entire operation which included hosting of bogus police notice and its targeted display to Internet users, was being handled by his brother, B. Chanderkant, who operated from Veal Pon, near capital city Phnom Penh of Cambodia, the officer said.
“In the investigation so far, more than 20 bank accounts were found to be used to route the defrauded money. Cheating of more than ₹30 lakh has been accounted for through identified UPI IDs and QR codes used in the bogus notices over a period from February to June this year. Dhinushanth disclosed that the cheated money was being moved out from the banking system through cryptocurrencies by Chanderkant,” he said.
The police said the matter is further being investigated to unravel the complete money trail as more accounts are suspected to be used for hiding the money trail.
