Chinese man among 21 nabbed for extortion through small loan apps

Superintendent of Police (Cyber), Ketan Bansal, said, “We will inform and coordinate with the Intelligence Bureau (IB) in the probe. The agency is likely to interrogate the arrested Chinese national. The mastermind, Parvaj Alam, was given the alias of Jeetu Bhadana by his Chinese handlers. Alam was planning to escape to Bangladesh. A total of five online loan applications — Hugo Loan, Cashfree, Fly Cash, Cash Coin, AA Loan — were found on Chinese servers. In India, these applications were being managed by Alam, who was in direct contact with Wan Chenghua.”

Police said all the men had been produced in a local court and sent to four days of police custody. Investigators so far have recovered Rs 17 lakh in cash, nine laptops, 41 mobile phones, one Desktop computer and an expired passport, belonging to Wan Chenghua.

According to details, the raids by the cyber cell of Chandigarh Police were conducted in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Delhi, and Rajasthan in connection to two FIRs that had been lodged by UT residents Arvind Kumar and Vinit Kumar. Both Arvind and Vinit in their FIRs had claimed that they had taken easy loans ranging from Rs 3,500 to Rs 5,000 and were now being blackmailed by the loan companies, who threatened to leak their morphed nude pictures online and to their families. In one of the cases, the loan company had allegedly sent a morphed photo of one of the men to his contacts.

After receiving the complaints, a team of DSP A Venkatesh, Inspector Ranjeet Singh, Sub-Inspector KD Singh, Head Constables Bahadur Singh, Rajinder Singh, Balwinder Singh, and Constable Baljeet Singh conducted raids across the coubtry to bust the gang.

IG (UT) Raj Kumar Singh, “During investigations, it came to light that the instant loan application was developed and is run by Chinese nationals on China-based servers. Further, the Chinese nationals targeted and lured people in from India and hired them on a specific salary for call centre jobs. The people in India were trained how to blackmail people through online loan applications. The men were taught how to use force, blackmail and threats to get people to return the money that had been loaned. In some states, some incidents of people allegedly dying by suicide has been recorded after their morphed nude pictures were circulated on social media by these loan agents.”

Police said the users were required to give permission to these loan apps to access contacts, photos, videos of the installer’s phone. This was later used as a tool for blackmailing people.

The arrested suspects were identified as Lekh Raj Bairwa of Rajasthan, Anshul Kumar of UP, Manish Raj of Delhi, Sandeep of Delhi, Gyandeep of Rewari in Haryana, Ashish Kumar Tanwar of Mahendergarh in Haryana, Deepak Chand, Saurav Jha, Manvender Raghav of South West Delhi, Hemant Kumar of New Delhi, Neeraj Singh of UP, Om Parkash Jha of Bihar, Manjit Kumar of UP, Uttam Malik of Orissa, Ashish Mishra of Khushinagar in UP, Vikash Mahto of Bihar, Rajesh Kumar of Berhampur in UP, Rajiv Kumar of Gazipur in UP, and the Wan Chenghua of Greater Noida.