Cops check Chinese firm links to gamers’ suicide
In the second week of July, T. Madhukar, 24, of Lakshettipet in Mancherial district died by suicide. He had lost `15 lakh to fraudsters on the online gaming site Dafabet. Madhukar had borrowed the money from his friends.
Like Madhukar, there were three more persons who ended their lives in separate incidents — one in Narsingi police limits, the other in Sanjeeva Reddy Nagar while the third victim belonged to Chennai — all of whom lost several lakhs of rupees.
As the investigators are digging out the shady deals and transactions involving the Chinese firm Beijing T Power, whose head of operations for southeast Asia Yah Hao was arrested by the Hyderabad police recently, the sleuths have launched a parallel probe to ascertain whether the four victims of online gaming fraud were cheated by the Chinese company.
If the links are established between the victims and Yah Hao’s companies, the Chinese national will be in for more trouble as the police have decided to charge him and other accused with abetment to suicide in each of the four cases. Interestingly, while the world was dealing with the deadly Covid-19, which originated from China, Chinese companies like Beijing T Power were minting money during the lockdown as transactions of this company, reflected in the bank transactions, skyrocketed between March and July as people who remained indoors invested heavily, only to suffer losses. The total value of inward transaction traced is over `1,100 crore, a majority of which was during the lockdown due to the pandemic this year.
Sources told Deccan Chronicle that the mobilephones of the victims will be examined to ascertain whether they placed bets in the companies linked to the Chinese firms, whose effort was to constantly establish new companies and move operations from one company to the other. To lure the gamers initially, the stakes would be in the ratio of 7:3, which means that the gamer would win seven out of 10 times. Subsequently, the company had programmed its systems in the reverse, that is 3:7 ratio, and this is when many started losing large amounts of money.
Sources said that some evidence linking the victim with the accused company has emerged in the suicide in Chennai. The Hyderabad police are in touch with their counterparts in Chennai even as they are out on the trail of the transactions of the victims in Telangana state.
The website on which they placed the bets, the payment gateways, details of their bank accounts are among the aspects under investigation. So far, suspicious death cases have been registered in connection with the suicides.
While online gaming was being organised by initiating prospective gamers through Telegram groups and the admins of these groups would usually indicate the websites on which the registered members can play games and place bets, these websites were being changed on a daily basis. Players would place bets on colours in a game called ‘colour prediction’.