Fraudsters dupe 15,000 people of ₹712 crore, launders money to China. This is how they operated

livemint.com:

₹700 crore in less than a year. Hyderabad Police Commissioner CV Anand in a presentation explained the modus operandi of the scamsters and said how they used the technology to dupe the people. The scamsters send messages to people to invest starting with small amounts.

The complainant said he was offered a part-time job to 'rate and review' (certain tasks) via a messaging app. Believing it to be genuine, he registered in their website. Subsequently, though the complainant had earned a profit of ₹20,000 after investing ₹25,000, he was not allowed to withdraw the profit.

He was further made to invest money and he lost ₹28 lakh in total. During the course of investigation, it was found that ₹28 lakh that the victim lost had been transferred to six accounts and from there the money has been transferred to various Indian bank accounts and finally in Dubai. The fraudulent money was used to purchase cryptocurrency.

In the multilayered fraud, a resident of Ahmedabad, one of the arrested persons, was found to be associated with some Chinese citizens. He coordinates with them by sharing information on Indian bank accounts and shares the OTPs for operating these accounts from Dubai/China through remote access apps, the release said. It was also found that one of the arrested persons has shared over 65 accounts to Chinese citizens in which transactions to an amount of ₹128 crore took place.

Some of the cryptowallet transactions in the fraud were found to have linkages with Hezbollah wallet (labelled as wallet belonging to terror financing module), a police release said. The Cyber Crime Police had registered a case, based on the complaint lodged by a Hyderabad resident. Initially, he was given simple task to give five star rating by