Indo-pak gang busted for online fraud, 2 held

BHOPAL/INDORE: The Madhya Pradesh police have arrested two persons from Mumbai for allegedly misappropriating lakhs of rupees belonging to at least 13 people through credit/debit card detailsobtainedillegallythrough darknet with the help of a Pakistani handler.

Ramkumar Pillai and Ramkumar Nadar were arrested after Jaikishan Singh, a manager with Bank of India, Ujjain, complained that ~72,000 had been illegally spent from his credit card.

Their handler, Sheikh Afzal, operates from Lahore and has access to darknet (hidden websites not accessible through search engines) e-commerce website FE Shop, based in Russia, which trades in illegal credit/ debit card and other financial transaction details, said Indore cyber cell chief Jitendra Singh.

The duo, with Afzal’s help, used to buy card details for $9-$12 (around ₹585-₹780) and use them to buy goods and flight tickets from foreign-based websites in which one-time password (OTP) was not required.

“Afzal held the master control for entering into FE Shop and he had the mechanism to keep tabs on what the others were doing,” Singh said.

Police said Nadar and Pillai used to interact daily with Afzal over Skype and transferred half of the defrauded money to him through Bitcoins.

As Nadar had worked as a manager in a reputed bank in Mumbai earlier, he used to get refunds for using the cards illegally. “The gang has been operating from 2013. We have identified 13 victims and are calculating the amount defrauded,” Singh said.

Police have recovered 25 credit and debit cards and several mobile phones from their possession till now.