MHA unit busts phone fraud racket, arrests 8

NEW DELHI: A pan-India ‘fraud to phone’ racket has been busted by a home ministry unit in joint operations with the Madhya Pradesh police and other state forces, leading to the arrest of eight people — across Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh — who cheated people through cyber fraud and used the money to buy expensive China-made phones from e-commerce sites. The phones were then sold in the black market at a 5-10% discount but at a huge profit for the crooks.

The ‘fraud to phone’ (F2P) gang involved hundreds of operatives who were running different legs of the transactions involving OTP fraud, credit card fraud, e-commerce fraud, fake IDs, fake mobile numbers, fake addresses, black marketing, tax evasion, money laundering and dealing with stolen goods.