MUMBAI: In a joint investigation into the fake loan app scam, a dedicated officer from Nepal’s cyber police wing has been assigned to coordinate with Bandra-Kurla Complex cyber cops to provide probe details of two Nepali call centres —Blue Sky Business Solutions and Sky World Service Pvt Ltd —busted in the last week of July. The call centres would edit Indian loan app victims’ photos. The morphed nude images and videos would be used by the loan app “recovery agents” for blackmail and extortion.
Mumbai cyber police said they learnt the loan app fraudsters had outsourced editing of the photos and making threat calls to lakhs of victims across the country following the arrest of 14 suspects, including three women, in the case involving Rs 350 crore extortion amount since 2018.
Nepal police have shared details of 71 arrested accused from the two call centres raided last month, including two Indians, Neha Gupta (19) from Bihar and Manish Saini (26), employed at the supervisory level at Blue Sky Business Solutions since November 2021.
Of the 14 accused arrested by BKC police between June 26 and July 13, three including two women from Manipur were released on bail. On Tuesday, the remaining 11 were produced before the Kurla court and their custody was extended till August 8. Mumbai cyber police sought their custody to get more bank transaction details as they had found Rs 130 crore from one of the suspects, Sneha Somani (30) from Malad. “We have also seized an 80GB hard disc from Liyang Sheng (39), held in Bengaluru. The hard disc stored morphed pornographic video,” said a cyber police officer at BKC.
Nepal police central spokesperson, deputy inspector general of police (DIG) Tek Prasad Rai, in a video call on Tuesday told TOI: “ Mumbai cyber DCP Hemraj Singh Rajput has been in touch with our team for the case details. These call centres have been on the radar for the last few months. They started their operation a year ago and the raid was carried out after four Chinese planners visited these centres. The probe is on how the photos and videos of the victims are morphed and transferred to India.” Rai said they have seized 362 laptops and 748 computers from the call centres.
A Kathmandu police officer said Gupta would recruit callers from Nepal who were good in Hindi to issue threats. She earned 65,000 Nepalese rupees a month and commission based on recovery. While Manish Saini worked as a manager who provided content and scripts to the callers to make abusive and threatening calls.
