Bhubaneswar, Aug 17: The India Head of the Bangalore based mega online Chinese earning APP scam was arrested by the Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of Odisha Crime Branch from Aviyur near Madurai.
EOW sources here on Thursday said one S. Chitravel (31), who completed MBA was arrested on August 14 last and was produced before a local court in Tamil Nadu.
He was brought to Odisha and produced before OPID Court at Cuttack on August 16.The OPID court granted 5 days police remand of the accused.
EOW sources said one Guanhua Wang, (40 ) of Hangzhou, China along with two other Chinese nationals (one male and one female) visited Bangalore in 2019 and created 3 Shell companies to run different Cyber-financial scams.
Chitravel was made Director of ‘Bettec Technologies Private Limited” , one of the three companies.
During Covid the trio went back to China but continued running the scam through Chitravel and some other hired directors and facilitators.
Chitravel used to get Rs.1 lakh per month to run the illegal scam in India.He used to manage the gang who were sending the morphed porn pictures of loan victims and their family members, friends and contacts.
Earlier, these Chinese people were running illegal digital Loan Apps. However after many people committed suicides being trapped in loan Apps, Law Enforcement Agencies started crackdown against Chinese Loan Apps and Government banned many such loan apps.
After the loan apps were banned, they started running Earning Apps with a promise of doubling/ tripling money and other App based cyber-financial frauds.
They were using the morphed photos of celebrities like Amitabh Bachhan, Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Sachin Tendukar, Technical Guruji ( famous YouTuber), Urfi Javed in their online Ads to lure the new victims.
Money is being siphoned out of India in thousands of crores to China through these scams. They generally use multiple layers of mule bank accounts at lower level, current bank accounts of shell companies/ hired firms, Crypto traders and some dubious export-import firms to siphon money out of India.
Initial investigations suggest siphoning of more than 100 crores by the company using above methods.
On the request of EOW, Odisha Ministry of Home Affairs has issued a Look Out Circular against Guanhua Wang.
The EOW has advised the Crypto-traders to verify the antecedent of crypto buyers especially when the amount is huge and avoid P2P (peer to peer) trade with suspicious buyers.
