Indian SIMs sent from Noida to Cambodia gang for cyber fraud

Noida: A 32-year-old man was arrested from Kolkata for actively procuring SIM cards from the grey market and dispatching them to cyber scammers in Cambodia, who were then using those numbers to target Indians from scores of call centres set up in the south Asian country, from where the organised fraud ran. The gang mostly offer their targets enticing opportunities to make quick money, only to exploit them in a range of cyber fraud schemes, including stock market trading and investment. They were also involved in sending people looking for jobs in south Asia to Cambodia, where they instead landed in the cyber fraud trap.

DCP (Central Noida) Suniti said Rahul Sinha was apprehended in Kolkata on Monday evening and was brought to Greater Noida by a police team from Bisrakh on Tuesday.Sinha’s arrest comes just four months after three members — one of them a Chinese national and another a Nepalese — of the gang were caught with 530 pre-activated Indian SIM cards. These SIM cards were allegedly procured by Sinha using “fake identity cards” from various local suppliers by fraudulently capturing biometric fingerprints of customers who came to those shops.“These SIM cards were a part of a bigger consignment that Sinha was to ship to the gang. We have come to know that he was paid Rs 32 lakh to supply 10,000 activated Indian SIM cards to the syndicate. He had partly hand-delivered and partly couriered 530 of these to the three gang members — Su Youming from China, Anil Thapa from Nepal, and Vinod alias Agastya Bhati, a resident of Greater Noida — before they were arrested from Greater Noida in March. Sinha claimed he aborted the plan to deliver the remaining SIM cards soon after,” Bisrakh SHO Arvind Kumar told TOI.Three mobile phones and a laptop seized from Sinha will now be sent for forensics analysis to find further clues on the gang.“So far, we have come to know that these pre-activated SIM cards were used to create social media accounts on Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, and a few Chinese apps that would be managed from Cambodia and then used to defraud people in India through various cyber schemes,” the DCP said.Sinha has been charged under sections 420 (cheating), 467, 468 and 471 (all related to forgery) of the Indian Penal Code. The case was registered under IPC, and not BNS, as it is an extension of the March arrest, police said.According to cops, the three men arrested in March were in the process of setting up an office in Sector 18 to serve as a front for their activities. Apart from documents, cops recovered Rs 94,710, along with currency in Nepalese rupee, Cambodian riel, US dollars, dirham, Thai baht and yuan.In May, nearly 60 Indians, lured to Cambodia with a promise of jobs and forced into cyber fraud activities by trafficking gangs, were rescued by Indian authorities. TOI had earlier reported how many of them were kept in captivity, assaulted, given jolts of electric shocks and forced to work hours after hours.
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