With the arrest of one person from Madhya Pradesh, the Cyber Crime wing of Uttar Pradesh Police on Tuesday claimed to have busted a pan-India ”currency trading” fraud involving fake demat accounts.
Around 500 such accounts were opened and people duped to the tune of Rs 15 crore by a gang, whose key member has been arrested from Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, police said.
A team from the Cyber Crime police station in Noida led by Inspector Reeta Yadav was investigating a complaint of a Ghaziabad resident, who claimed that he was duped of Rs 15 lakh on the pretext of investment in currency trading.
The arrested person was identified as Shoib Mansoori (24), the Uttar Pradesh Cyber Police said in a statement.
”He is a key member of a gang that has cheated people of crores of rupees by opening demat accounts in the name of currency trading,” police said. Explaining the modus operandi of the gang, the police said Mansoori opened the accounts after getting his partners to call up potential targets.
The gang had opened an office in the name of ‘Amdani Solution’ in Indore, Madhya Pradesh.
”To access all the demat accounts, the admin used to keep the user ID and password with himself. A fraudulent android application for trading — MetaTraders — was created that could be downloaded from Play Store,” police said in the statement.
The money was taken from the customer in different bank and demat accounts. The amount reflected in the demat account was only visible to the customer in the form of digits, which appeared to be increasing but that was not the case in reality. Because of this, the customer trusted and invested more money, they added.
Later, when the customer wanted to take profits of this amount, more money had to be transferred to different bank accounts in the name of GST conversion charge and settlement charge, the statement said.
Around 500 such fraud demat accounts were opened and people from different states were duped of about Rs 15 crore, police said.
