Police bust Jamtara cyber fraud gang

NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police on Wednesday announced the arrest of 31-year-old man from West Bengal’s Murshidabad, who illegally procured Indian and international SIM cards in bulk, activated them, and then sold them to cybercriminals operating from Jharkhand’s Jamtara district and other parts of the country.

Officers aware of the arrest said they had seized nearly 22,000 SIM cards from the accused, identified as Nasim Malitya. “It took us nearly six hours to count all the SIM cards. Nearly 16,000 of them were of three leading cellular service providers of India. International SIM cards from countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka were also there,” said an investigator probing the case, on condition of anonymity.

Malitya’s arrest came after the Delhi Police busted a gang of cyber crooks operating from Jamtara and arrested five people involved in running a pan-India scam, in which they would impersonate customer care executives of various banks and e-commerce sites, and dupe unsuspecting customers.

“Apart from the 21,761 used and unused SIM cards that were recovered from Malitya, at least 12,500 pre-activated SIM cards were already provided to Jamtara’s cyber criminals over a period of one year. The cyber criminals were posting their mobile numbers on Google as the customer care helplines of banks of repute and several e-commerce sites,” said DCP (outer-north) Ravi Kumar Singh. Senior officers said the Jamtara gang was busted by the cyber police station of Delhi’s outernorth district following a complaint filed by a Dubai resident, who was duped of ₹10 lakh while he was in Delhi to meet his daughter.