On August 14 last year, 32-year-old Delhi Police head constable Prem Lata said she got a call from a man. He told her he had to transfer Rs 25,000, part of her husband’s salary, but wasn’t able to send the sum to the latter’s account. The caller told her that her husband asked that the money be transferred to her Google Pay account instead.
Lata gave her GPay number to the man and received messages saying that Rs 20,000 and Rs 50,000 had been transferred to her account. The caller then asked her to return Rs 45,000, claiming it was sent to her by mistake. She returned the amount. He again asked her to send some money and she did.
Lata, however, never received any money. Realising she had been duped of Rs 60,000, the resident of Vipin Garden Extension lodged a complaint at the Dwarka Cyber Police Station.
As police began their probe into the cyber fraud, they found that a former employee of a prominent bank in Delhi was helping create fake accounts to move the stolen money. The accused, Dhan Singh Rajput, who was arrested earlier this month, allegedly opened 16 such fake accounts of people on the pretext of giving them loans, and used these accounts to facilitate 153 cyber frauds.
An officer from the Dwarka Cyber Police Station said a few of these accounts were used by Rajput, 31, to execute the frauds and others were sourced to fraudsters. Police are yet to trace the man who made the call to the head constable.
How the case was cracked
After receiving Lata’s complaint, police said they first tracked the account into which her money was transferred and found that it belonged to Bharti Meena, a resident of Dausa in Rajasthan. When police approached Meena, she told them that a bank employee — none other than Rajput — created her account. Rajput claimed he would give a loan against her buffalo if she opened an account with his bank, so she agreed.
However, after a few days, Rajput dropped by her house saying that the loan couldn’t be processed due to some technical issues. He took away her debit card and the bank kit, saying that he would close the account.
The account though, police said, was never closed.
“In January, a notice under Section 41A of the CrPC was issued against Rajput. He joined the probe and claimed all the accounts he opened were in line with the bank’s policies. But on further investigation, we found that he had opened accounts of multiple villagers in the Mewat area on the pretext of giving them easy loans. Later, he would pretend to close their accounts, on the same pretext that the loan couldn’t be processed, and ask them for an OTP to do so,” said the officer.
These OTPs, however, were not for closing accounts. “The OTPs were to change the phone numbers registered with the accounts. These numbers were of fraudsters, who would then use them as mule accounts to execute scams,” the officer said.
When police approached the bank, authorities claimed to have fired Rajput for being involved in fraudulent activities.
On August 17 this year, police arrested Rajput from Dausa and recovered a debit card, a cheque book and a phone from his possession.
A detailed probe into the timeline of the cases he has been involved in and his connections with fraudsters is underway,” said the officer.
