Ahmedabad: Nigerian gang involved in duping 4,727 people busted, cops arrest seven

The city Crime Branch officials on Tuesday arrested seven accused involved in the duping 4,727 people from across India on the pretext of providing income tax returns. The scam was being run by a Nigerian gang.

The accused hacked into bank accounts, mobile and personal data of the victim, got access to their accounts and transferred money. The technical team of the cyber cell of Crime Branch hacked into their data and deconstructed their entire process to get their links.

As per cyber cell officials, in a complaint lodged Tejas Shah, 42, a resident of Ambawadi area on January 4, 2019, someone hacked his bank accounts, mobile phone and Rs 2.10 lakh was transferred to another bank without his knowledge. On June 21, 2018, he got a message from income tax IG-ITDEFL stating, 'your income tax refund to your account has been put on hold due to incomplete mobile verification.' To complete the process, link was shared with the message in which he was asked to fill up the online form with personal data such as PAN card, bank account number, debit card details, Aadhar card etc.

Rajdeep Zala, DCP, cyber cell said, "Message was sent by the hacker and they created pages phishing the Income-tax and bank website. They later tracked the victims account password and other confidential information by tricking him into believing the authencity of message."

The hackers would then access to the person's bank account and hack their mobile. Later, they would transfer the money to another dummy bank account of theirs. "The accused createddummy bank accounts like Kotak 811, RBL, Catholic Syrian and IDFC banks online by using victim's data. Once the money was transferred to the dummy accounts, it was then converted into bitcoins and transferred to a cryptocurrency wallet of Nigeria," said Zala.

During the investigation, with the help of the technical team and an ethical hacker, Cybercops accessed hackers data. During this, they got to know of 4,727 Indian victims data stored in their system. "We were able to recover a list of phone numbers used by the hacker, but most of the numbers were untraceable. One of the active numbers was from Mumbai. A team was sent to the spot and seven accused including three Nigerian gang members were arrested," said JM Jadav, ACP Cyber cell.