Cops found 200 mule bank accounts across five states to deposit siphoned Rs 7.9 crore; the businessman did not believe when real cops went to alert him and approached them two days later after his bank balance went to zero and scammers asked him to take a loan to transfer more funds

Mumbai: A 73-year-old businessman from Andheri (West) registered an FIR on July 21 at the West cyber police station against unknown persons who allegedly kept him under digital arrest for two weeks from July 5 to 18 and made him transfer Rs 7.9 crore to half a dozen bank accounts, including one in Delhi, on the pretext of verifying the source of money he earned. Cyber police said they saved at least Rs 1.1 crore of the total amount so far.The senior citizen filed the complaint after realising he was being duped when the scammers kept demanding more money and asked him to take a loan after his bank account got empty. Police said the scammers threatened him by claiming his Aadhaar card and PAN card were used to open a bank account for a money laundering case related to Jet Airways founder Naresh Goyal registered in Delhi.“The probe found at least 200 mule bank accounts were opened in at least five different states to transfer the funds that were duped from the senior citizen from Andheri. We could have saved a larger sum had he believed our cyber police when they even took help of local police officers in uniform to convince him, but he didn’t,” said DCP (cyber) Bajrang Bansode.Bansode said cyber police and local police officers in uniform visited the senior citizen’s home for two days after the police received an alert from the Delhi police about the fraud and funds getting credited to a mule bank account in Delhi that was used by scammers in the cyber fraud. Police said the businessman did not believe the officers and did not allow them to step in to talk, and kept denying that he was not a victim of any fraud.“The Delhi police team, after freezing the account, gathered information of all those account holders who transferred the funds to it and started calling the victims. However, the Andheri senior citizen did not respond to the call. This made them contact us through the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) intelligence team in New Delhi to communicate with the victim after noticing continuous fund transactions were carried out from his account,” he said.The fraud began on July 5. The complainant said: “I received a WhatsApp call at 11.30 am. The caller told me that he was from the Delhi police and that they needed to interrogate me as my bank account was used in a multi-crore money laundering case related to Jet Airways founder Naresh Goyal registered there.”The complainant said he believed the caller as the WhatsApp number had a Delhi Police display picture. “They told me that since the case was related to national security, they would investigate it with extreme confidentiality and therefore, I should not tell anyone at home about it,” he said. “Later, I received a WhatsApp video call for the ‘interrogation’. The caller identified himself as Rahul Gupta from Delhi Police. He said that my Aadhaar card details had been used to open an account in a nationalised bank and Rs 7 crore had been deposited in the account, which was related to the money laundering case. He also threatened to send an arrest warrant via WhatsApp. I got scared and ended up losing money.”