The Mumbai Police Crime Branch has arrested three brothers and seven accomplices who cheated over 500 people of ₹6.36 crore over the past one year in an online foreign exchange trading racket.
Crime Branch officials said its Unit III team found out that the gang operated from a rented space near Pritam Hotel in Dadar. Based on a tip-off, the team raided the office and arrested the 10 accused. They also took into custody 63 employees and seized 97 laptops.
Dilip Sawant, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Detection), said, “The accused set up capitaltrade.com and invited people to invest in foreign currency by registering their names and contact numbers on the website. Customers were contacted using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) from numbers registered in Sri Lanka. The accused wanted to create the impression that the agency was based outside the country.”
The masterminds
The police said that three brothers — Tanveer, Asad and Shahrukh Shaikh — were behind the racket. Tanveer, who is a licensed stock broker, came up with the idea of starting the website and scamming people. The police said that the brothers then hired Vyankatachalam Mariappa, Fayyaz Shaikh, Sanjay Vaishnav, Pervaz Khan and Jafar Shaikh as their agents, Imran Khan as their accountant and Azharuddin Shaikh to monitor calls made by employees.
Mr. Sawant said, “The employees were graduates looking for jobs. The accused hired them by claiming that their work was approved by the Reserve Bank of India. Inquiries so far do not indicate their wilful involvement in the racket.” The police said the employees were asked to convince customers to invest at least $100 in Indian rupees using an e-wallet. The agents would receive the money and the accused would create fake accounts for the customers showing high returns on the investments made by them. The accused would then use these bogus figures to coax victims into investing more money through the website.
Mr. Sawant said, “Once the accused swindled maximum money from their customers, they would sever contact with them. The victims would then have no way of contacting the accused as all communication was made through VOIP calls. We are now contacting the victims using the data recovered from the laptops.”
