Noida: The Noida unit of the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force on Friday arrested six people linked to threat emails sent to 20 schools in the district last month. Investigators traced the emails — originating from US servers — to a house in Bisrakh. Police said the men were running an online betting operation using fake email IDs and VoIP numbers.Noida STF’s additional superintendent of police Rajkumar Mishra said on Jan 23 about 20 schools in Noida received bomb threat emails. With Republic Day round the corner, senior police officers swept the campuses alongside the bomb disposal squad, dog squad and the fire department. The threats turned out to be hoaxes.To trace the origin of these emails, a case was registered at Surajpur police station under sections 351(4) (criminal intimidation) and 353(4)(b) (statements conducing to public mischief) of BNS and Section 66 of the IT Act. The STF team initially traced the emails to the USA, but they later found the email id was linked to a recovery email ID originating in Bangladesh. Further scrutiny made them zero in on a house in Bisrakh. The team conducted a raid on Friday and found that the house was being used to run an illegal betting racket. The team found nearly 30 people working in the house and six of them – Amish Jang Kari, Lekhnath, Kedarnath, Ananth Kumar, Divyanshu and Sahil Kumar — were taken in for questioning . Three of them, Kari, Lekhnath, and Kedarnath, are Nepalese citizens. Electronic devices, including four laptops and 22 mobile phones, 16 debit and credit cards, two Nepalese passports, identity cards, a chequebook and Rs 19,500 cash were seized from them. Police claimed the men told them they were running an online betting operation and often cheated American, Indian and Nepalese citizens. They posed as tech support executives for online betting apps and lured them into placing large bets. They used VPNs, due to which their location was traced to the USA. They accepted payments in bitcoins and transferred the money through hawala. After questioning, they were arrested.Amish told police he was from Kathmandu, Nepal, and had pursued a BBA degree in Australia between 2019 and 2022. He met a man named Devraj, and both of them founded a gaming app, Gamemano, in 2023. Agra-based Ananth connected with Amish through social media and joined the company. He brought Divyanshu along with him. Ananth and Divyanshu had been colleagues at an office in Noida.Lekhnath and Kedarnath, on the other hand, have MBA degrees. Both of them worked with Devraj in 2023 and met Amish through him.Additional SP Mishra said that the recovery email for the address from which the hoax bomb threats had been sent was logged into on a mobile phone seized from one of the men. However, the reason behind their sending those emails is still under investigation.
