The Rajsamand District police arrested 8 people on Wednesday 15 March for an alleged Forex Fraud. The Police team conducted a raid at a location in Rajsamand on Wednesday and seized more than 20 mobile phones and computers along with other equipment from 8 persons. This group was allegedly operating an unauthorized Forex Trade Call Centre, through which they were duping people through fraudulent schemes of investing in online currency market and Forex Trading. The 8 persons were remanded to Police custody after they were presented in Court in Udaipur.

How a Complaint led to the Raid

The Police got into action after receiving a call from a person named Manish Kumar Bhoi of Rajsamand. Manish, in his complaint said that he received a call in which he was asked to invest in the Online Forex Market. Manish received the link to a website and a username and password. Subsequent to this, he was asked to deposit Rs. 2,10,000 towards GST. After the deposit was made, the called stopped responding to his calls.

Sudhir Joshi, SP of Rajasamand Police constituted multiple teams, which were sent to Dewas and Ujjain in search of the accused. Personnel of the Police team spread out through the towns in the guise of Ice Cream vendors and vegetable vendors and narrowed in on Lucky, who was operating this call center from a rented apartment in Dewas. After interrogating Lucky, the Police returned to Rajsamand and arrested 7 other accomplices in this racket.

The arrested accused included Lucky Jaiswal (21), Harpal Singh Rajput (21), Raghu Prajapat (19) and Surendra Singh (21) hail from Dewas and Digvijay Singh alias Bunty (19), Harshit Mewara (19), Rahul Singh (19) and Satish Singh Rajput (24) hail from Sihor in Madhya Pradesh.

Modus Operandi of the Call Center

The group of 7 persons operated a Call Centre from Rajsamand, under the directions of Lucky, who was sitting in Dewas., as per Beni Prasad, DSP, Rajsamand Police.

The accused called people across the country and offered them to invest in various high return schemes of Forex Trading through a mobile application. Once the money was transferred by the targeted person, it would get siphoned off and the callers stop answering the calls thereafter. The group has duped a huge number of people residing in Rajasathan, Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Mumbai and the volume of fraud translates to Crores of rupees, the DSP added.

Each of the team members had good command over English and Hindi and they used make VOIP calls to unsuspecting persons and posed as employees of an online trading website called “I Forex”. They were lured with promises of high returns, said Beni Prasad. The team members were recruited by Lucky and belong to various places around Dewas. The recruits were trained in English conversation and provided a list of persons who were into investing. The recruits used to call these people and transfer the call to Lucky who used to counsel them into investing with promises of high returns. Once the person was convinced, Lucky used to send them the link, username and password of “I Forex”. The investor used to register on the website and transfer the funds to the (fraud) company’s account. Once the transfer was made, the so called company phone number was switched off.

Those arrested have been booked under the relevant sections of the IPC that deal with cheating, forgery and breach of trust. In the initial interrogation, the accused have accepted to having cheated people to the tune of Crores of Rupees. The arrested will be in Police custody for further interrogation and investigation.