Bhubaneswar: Four cyber scammers have been arrested for cheating a man of Rs 14 lakh in the name of online trading of bitcoin, police said on Thursday.
The accused are Vivekanand Mallick, Sapan Kumar Dalei, Sunil Kumar Das, and Bijan Kumar Panda, all from Balasore district. They were nabbed on the basis of a complaint by one Pramod Sahu of Chintamaniswar in Bhubaneswar who alleged that he was cheated to the tune of Rs 14 lakh in the name of online trading of bitcoin. Police have also seized Rs 39 lakh from their bank accounts along with 10 ATM cards, 5 passbooks, 7 cheque books, a laptop, four mobile phones and a SIM card from their possession.
As per reports, a few days back he received an offer in his WhatsApp where he was prompted to invest money and earn sitting at his home. Being lured by the offer he initially invested Rs 1000 and got the return. Then on a different occasion he invested Rs 50,000 and got back Rs 60,000 in his account.
Finding a good prey in the victim, the fraudster induced him to invest in Bitcoin . Finding good return the victim agreed to the proposals and provided them all his credentials like Adhar and PAN to the fraudster who opened an account in the name of the victim in Bitcoin site and insisted the victim to invest Rs 5 lakhs.
After investing, to convince the victim they provided a screen shot in which the victim saw that against the money he has invested, he has got rerun of Rs 2 lakhs.
Now he wanted to withdraw the amount but in vain. Yet, when he contacted the fraudsters, they asked him to deposit more money towards GST. In this way he went on losing money. And later as he tried to contact them, the fraudsters blocked his number.
While one of the accused Sunil Das was a sales manager in bank, his accomplice Sapan Dalei was helping him create fake bank accounts. Police has stepped up efforts to trace involvement of other people and investigation is underway, he said.
police.Based on his complaint, police registered a case and nabbed the scammers. Even though such scammers are on the prowl across the country and also operating from abroad, the report of the cyber frauds operating from Balasore district has left people in shock.
