Faridabad Police busts interstate cyberfraud gang

Faridabad Police has busted an interstate gang arresting seven of its members for allegedly duping over 180 people across 21 states in a credit card fraud, a senior police officer here said on Thursday.

The accused posed as SBI employees and elicited credit card information from unsuspecting customers.

Police has recovered Rs 22.60 lakh in cash, 35 mobiles, 109 SIM cards and 15 ATMs from the possession of the accused.

The accused were identified as Sonveer, Rahul, a native of Bhind in Madhya Pradesh, Aman, a native of Itawah in Uttar Pradesh, Shakti, a native of Bihar, and Pankaj and Abdullah, both from Delhi, who were arrested from the city's Uttam Nagar area.

Subhan, a native of Farrukhabad in UP, was arrested from his state.

Arora said the accused would buy customers’ data from Just Dial website and call them up using a toll free number posing as SBI executives.

They would then lie to the customer that they needed to get a new credit card and would offer them a new replacement. They would then ask them for card information - card number, CVV, PIN etc - telling them it is part of the process, he said.

Once they had got all the information, they would withdraw the funds, he added. “Taking cognisance of the increasing cybercrime, we formed a special team and our cybercrime police station team finally cracked the gang,” the top officer of the city said.

He said the gang was spread out in 21 states of India and committed 21 such crimes in Haryana including five in Faridabad.

In Faridabad cases they had duped over Rs 5 lakh from five people, he said.

In its investigation, the police went through 17 accounts of the accused and found transactions of about Rs 1.25 crore, he said.

The accused confessed duping 50 people in Telangana, 41 in UP, 21 in Haryana, 12 in Maharashtra, and seven in Tamil Nadu.

The also duped 21 in Delhi, six in Punjab, four in Rajasthan, four in MP, four in Uttarakhand, three in Gujarat, three in West Bengal, two each in Jharkhand and Odisha, and one each in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Karnataka.

The Police Commissioner rewarded the cybercrime team with cash prize of Rs 25000 for busting the gang.