Kanpur: Panki police and the cyber cell of West Zone Police busted a cyber fraud gang that duped people with investment promises, arresting five accused from Delhi and Ghaziabad.Police Commissioner Raghubir Lal said police arrested Rishi Sharma, Utsav Tyagi and Durgesh Kumar of Ghaziabad, Ajay Mittal of New Delhi, and Sachin of Gurugram. Police recovered 42 keypad mobiles, six landline phones, six seals, 40 ATM cards, 12,383 SIM cards, two driving licences, one biometric machine, a WhatsApp bot and a WiFi router from the accused.Police said the gang operated a call centre in Delhi. They recovered 12,000 SIM cards, 15 laptops, a scanner, stamps, more than 20 mobile phones and other documents. Police also identified several bank accounts linked to the accused, in which transactions worth crores were suspected to have taken place.The action followed a complaint by Keshav Agnihotri of Panki Gangaganj, who worked at an engineering solutions company in Hyderabad. On April 8, he received a promotional call offering rewards for reviewing the page of a well-known online company.Police said a WhatsApp call later came from someone named Riya Sharma, who shared a Telegram link and asked him to review Telegram and send money through it. Keshav made his first transaction on April 8, followed by several more. During this period, a young woman named Jiya Sharma got him added to more Telegram groups.Through 15 transactions, he was made to invest Rs 3.50 lakh between April 8 and 10, police said. The accused showed him a profit of Rs 5 lakh. When he tried to withdraw the amount, he was asked to deposit another Rs 5 lakh.Keshav realised he had been defrauded and filed a complaint at the 1930 helpline and at Panki police station. The Cyber Cell of West Zone and Panki Police launched an investigation.
