5 members of gang involved in online frauds arrested

CHANDIGARH: Haryana Police have busted a gang allegedly involved in siphoning off money from the bank accounts by cloning the fingerprints and using Aadhar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) in Palwal district.

The accused Rohit, 33, a resident of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh; Chitranjan, 28, Amir Hussain, 27, and Kiran, 28, of Bihar and Tularam, 40, of Khatela village in Palwal, were arrested following raids at different locations in Delhi and Palwal, police said. A woman is also a part of this gang involved in online frauds.

Police have recovered a biometric machine, 11 debit cards of different banks, 270 SIM cards (Vodafone, Idea, Airtel etc.), fingerprint rubber stamp machine, five bottles of rubber gel photo polymer, a laptop, printer, a lamination machine, 2,078 copies of registries (out of which 10 copies were used in online fraud), 220 fingerprint clone, 68 blank Aadhar cards, 21 PAN cards, 64 passport size photographs, five Aadhar cards and one pen drive from them.

A police team was formed after complaints were reported in the district about money being withdrawn without actual account owners making any transactions. Police have registered 43 cases of online fraud between May 24 and June 2, 2021. The fraudsters made attempts to get the documents used for fraud from the staff of registry offices. When they did not succeed in doing so, police said, the accused contacted a private person who did the binding of registry documents in Palwal tehsil and obtained copies of documents of registry done at a high cost.

Then they cloned the fingerprints of sellers and purchasers from the registry documents and carried out illegal transactions through biometric devices.