CHENNAI: In a major breakthrough, Tamil Nadu police’s cyber crime wing has traced the tentacles of the ‘FedEx’ scam to a kingpin in Bangladesh, an official release on Friday said.The release, however, did not say whether the police have uncovered the identity of this kingpin. This came up during the investigation of a case where a Chennai resident was scammed of Rs 1.18 crore recently, in which seven men from Maharashtra and Gujarat were arrested. Based on investigations and interrogations of the arrested accused, TN police uncovered a network operated by a kingpin in Dhaka, Bangladesh who coordinated with agents in India who allegedly scammed people.The release said that the Chennai resident was scammed by the accused who posed as FedEx executives and cybercrime officers to manipulate the victim into transferring large sums of money under the guise of proving innocence in a fake criminal investigation in August. The modus operandi of claiming that a parcel in her name contained banned goods and transferring the call to a “cybercrime officer” was used to extort Rs 1.18 crore from her.After she registered a complaint, the cyber crime cops began their investigation.This led to the arrest of three accused, one of whom was Ramesh Bhadabhai, to whose account the scammed money was transferred, and two cyber criminal agents Vivek Beladiya Damajbhai and Paresh Narshibhai Kalsaria.Further investigation led to the arrest of Vipul Bhagubhai Kovadiya from Darang in Bhuj Gujarat who acted as a mediator between the agents and the cybercriminals.Vipul revealed that two more agents based in Maharashtra were involved in this case and that they were the main Face to Face (F2F) agents in this case and that they would have the contact of the main accused in Dhaka, Bangladesh.The Cyber Crime Wing later traced these agents to Kurduvadi in Maharashtra. The two F2F agents Sahil Khudbuddin Attar (24) from Solapur in Maharashtra and Shahrukh Ebrahim Shaikh (27) from Kurduvadi in Maharashtra have been arrested.Police said that Sahil had installed an OTP APK file on the account holders’ phone allowing fraudulent transfers.The investigation uncovered that the network operated under the instructions of the kingpin at Dhaka, Bangladesh who coordinated the operations with agents like Sahil, who in turn worked as F2F agent to interact with account holders. Further investigation is ongoing, the cops said.
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