Hyderabad Police bust Rs 712 cr Chinese investment fraud, 9 held

Hyderabad (Telangana) [India], July 22 (ANI): Hyderabad Police on Saturday busted a Rs 712 crore investment fraud by Dubai-based Chinese operators and arrested nine people in this connection, police officials said.
Hyderabad Police Commissioner CV Ananda said the nine accused from Mumbai, Lucknow, Gujarat and Hyderabad were suspected to have links with fraudsters from Dubai and China.
The arrested accused have been identified as Prakash Mulchandbhai Prajapati, Kumar Prajapati, Naimuddin Wahiduddin Shaik, Gagan Kumar Soni, Parveez aka Guddu, Shameer Khan, Mohammed Munawar, Shah Sumair and Arul Dass in an investment fraud.
According to Hyderabad Commissioner CV Anand, "Based on the complaint lodged by the complainant of Chikkadpally, Cyber Crime Police had registered a case in Cr. No. 598/2023. The complainant said that he was offered a part-time job at 'Rate and Review' via the telegram app, he believed it to be genuine and registered on their website https://www.traveling-boost-99.com. Initially, he was given simple tasks to give a 5-star rating to one set of 5 tasks by loading /investing a smaller amount of Rs 1000 and he earned Rs 866 profit."
The police seized 17 mobile phones, 2 laptops, 22 sim cards, 4 debit cards, documents pertaining to 33 companies, 3 bank chequebooks, 12 currency notes and 6 coins of Chinese yuan currency and 1 passport from the alleged accused.
During the course of the investigation, it is found that Rs 28 lakhs that the victim lost had been transferred to 6 accounts including an account maintained in the name of Radhika Marketing from there the money has been transferred to various other Indian banks accounts and finally in Dubai the fraudulent money was used to purchase cryptocurrency, CV Ananda said. 
The account in the name of Radhika Marketing was being maintained by Munawar of Hyderabad. Investigations revealed that he along with Arul Dass, Shah Sumair and Shamir Khan went to Lucknow on the instructions of Manish, Vikas and Rajesh, who all are residents of Lucknow, to open bank accounts in the names of shell companies with an offer of Rs 2 lakh per account.
"They opened 33 shell companies and 61 accounts in the name of companies and handed over the same to Manish. Manish had hired Gagan for web designing of the companies and Nayeem to coordinate with the account holders. After opening the accounts he sold the accounts to Kumar Prajapati, an associate of Prakash Prajapati," he added.
According to police, Prakash Prajapathi, a resident of Ahmedabad is associated with Chinese Lee Lou Guangzhou, Nan Ye, Kevin Jun etc. He was coordinating with the Chinese in supplying Indian bank accounts and shared the OTPs for operating these accounts from Dubai/China through remote access apps.
The Chinese masterminds, as per the police, were running this entire system of task-based investment frauds. They run these scams and lure the victims by sending messages over Telegram.
The defrauded was credited to primary shell/mule bank accounts being supplied by Prakash Prajapati, layered to some secondary bank accounts to hide the proceeds of the crime. Finally, it was sent to the Chinese.
Prakash Prajapati was coordinating with his other associates, Arif, Anas, Khan Bhai, Piyush and Sailesh etc who are residents of Mumbai, settled in Dubai in converting the fraudulently gained Indian rupees to USDT (Crypto) and transfer the same to Chinese. For every fraudulent transaction in these accounts, Prakash Prajapati was paid a 2-3 per cent commission.
Further, the police found that Prakash Prajapati has supplied over 65 accounts to the Chinese in which transactions to an amount of Rs 128 crores took place and the other accounts through which this fraud money has been converted to USDT, is having a volume of Rs 584 Crores totalling over Rs 712 Crores have been siphoned by these fraudsters.
Police found that "Prakash Prajapathi is using a Tron coin wallet address for getting his commissions to be paid in USDT or TRON. These crypto wallet transactions in his wallet have crypto transfers to another wallet address, which in turn has been found to have transaction linkages with two other crypto wallets including Hezbollah wallet (labelled as wallet belonging to Terror Financing Module)", police said.
Further investigation is underway. (ANI)