Two more held for siphoning off Rs 23 lakh from Patiala MP's account

PATIALA: Two more persons were arrested by police on Wednesday evening in connection with siphoning off Rs 23 lakh from Patiala MP

Preneet Kaur

's bank account.


Ataullah Ansari was arrested from Fofnad village in

Jamtara district

of

Jharkhand

while two brothers from Bihar, Afsgar Ali and Noor Ali, currently residing at Mandi Gobindgarh in Fatehgarh Sahib district were also arrested by the police. They along with Ansari, who had been brought here from Jamtara, were produced before a local court on Thursday which sent them to eight days of police remand.

During the investigations, the police have dug out that these criminals were using a multi-layered operation to avoid detection. While there are callers who ring up individuals in the first layer, the people in second layer buy SIM cards and move money from one e-wallet to another. The third layer comprises of those who use this cash for making online bill payments and online shopping and collect cash from the general public. This cash is then distributed amongst the gang members.

Senior superintendent of police MS Sidhu said it has turned out that the persons arrested by the police had moved the money siphoned off from the MPs account into 23 online accounts of Spice India Company and then further into 28 e-wallets of PayTM before transferring the cash into a bank account operated by cyber criminals. This, they managed by using the OTP to replace the MP’s mobile number linked with her bank account with one of their own.

He said during interrogation, the three persons revealed they were working at the second layer of the operation and their job was to move the money into multiple e-wallets before transferring it to a bank account operated by the criminals. “Ansari has told his interrogators that he was not sure who made the call to the Patiala MP identifying himself as Rahul Agarwal. It has come to light that there were hundreds of callers operating from the deep forest of Jamtara. These callers get phone numbers and randomly call people to extract bank details,” Sidhu said adding “It is being perceived the caller is the kingpin of this gang."

The police have so far freezed all e-wallets in which the MP’s money had been transferred. They have also recovered 19 cell phones and 693 SIM cards from the three individuals. These SIM cards were used to open e-wallet accounts and had been secured using fake documents.