Navi Mumbai: The crime branch central unit team arrested a gang of six men who operated a betting racket on illegal gaming apps from an apartment in Panvel. With their arrest, the police claimed to have detected 76 scams across India reported by victims online on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCCRP), and the defrauded amount was around Rs 1 crore.Acting on a tip-off that a betting racket using a banned gaming app was operated from a rental apartment on the second floor in Marathon Building, Palaspe, Panvel taluka, the crime branch team raided the said apartment on Feb 14 and found six men accepting and offering bets, which are banned in India. Those arrested were Gautam Manwani (26), Bhushan Marawi (25), Rajsingh Chauhan (21), Nikhil Baghmare (24), Rahul Sona (24), all hailing from Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, and Alokprasad Manjhi (20) from Reva district, MP state. Sunil Shinde, senior inspector of crime branch central unit, said, “During interrogation of the accused in police custody remand for eight days, it was revealed that they were linked with cyber fraudsters operating from abroad and targeted victims in online betting, online stock market trading scam, job racketeering, work from home scam, etc.
From the six accused, we seized 18 mobile phones and two laptops collectively worth Rs 1.8 lakhs, and 20 debit cards of different banks. The technical examination of the seized gadgets revealed that they used 378 different bank accounts for online cyber frauds using banned gaming apps and websites.”
