EOW cracks down on multiple online ponzi schemes, freezes Rs 75Lakhs

Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha Police has cracked down on several online ponzi schemes and frozen around Rs 75 lakh lying in 14 different bank accounts across India, the police said on Wednesday.

Earlier, EOW had frozen Rs 1.22 crore in similar schemes/apps. There are multiple illegal apps and websites available on the internet which mislead people by running advertisements to multiply money within a few days/months, but after a few months these apps close their operation, police said.

The online fraud apps are Dice, Quickwrummy, Fly Aviator, Weonlinepro Three, MVP trader, Ft11, UNO, ForexDana, Live 22 cash, Aviator X, City5, Homer Alexander. Together, these apps had 1.56 crore+ downloads.

To lure the investors, these scammers are using morphed photographs of celebrities such as Amitabh Bachchan, Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Sachin Tendukar, Technical Guruji (famous YouTuber).

The EOW officials said the scamsters also used logos of big companies like Tata to mislead/impress people on various social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. In the earlier case, the EOW had found that an app named 'Join trade-Financial growth' was using morphed pictures of leading Bollywood personalities like Akshay Kumar and Manish Paul in order to mislead and instil trust in the investors. They also used some so-called social media influencers to promote these apps/schemes through their accounts. Some TV stars/small celebrities were found to be endorsing such social media influencers and their advice related to making quick money through these online ponzi apps, the EOW said. People from lower middle class families, including students, wishing to become rich in a short span of time using these shortcuts, became the victims of the online scam. The scamsters were collecting money only through UPI IDs reflected in the fraudulent app, which keep changing constantly each minute and such IDs were linked to savings and current accounts maintained in the name of many shell companies/firms as well as individual persons.

The total transactions in the above suspected bank accounts are of more than Rs 1,000 crore. However, it is suspected that these accounts are also used in other cyber/financial crimes related to online ponzi schemes, illegal digital loan apps, courier scam, sextortion, work from home scam, YouTube liking scam, rating scam.

The EOW further noticed that the deposited money is routed through very complex multi-layering of various mule accounts and finally the money is transferred out of India using Crypto trade. Most of these scams are operated from or have links in the UAE.