On the 13th of August, the Hyderabad Police arrested four persons including a Chinese national in a fraud case.
Arrested people were identified as Yah Hao, Dheeraj Sarkar, Ankit Kapoor and Neeraj Tuli. All of them are residents of Delhi and were running the illegal online gambling portal.
According to sources, the group of four were cheating a number of people by luring them into online gambling. With this online gambling, the company made approximately Rs. 1,100 crores.
The incident is said to be more alarming because some Chinese nationals are obtaining business visas and indulging in such fraud activities across India.
Recently, Telangana police registered several cases of suicides due to online betting.
After an initial investigation, the police seized bank accounts of the accused people with an amount of Rs. 30 crores.
Anjani Kumar, the Commissioner of Police of Hyderabad, carried out the operation and busted the gaming racket.
The online gambling was done through a Telegram group. Entry to the game was by reference only and members who would introduce a new member by referring would get a paid commission under the multi level marketing (MLM) strategy.
It was found that players would place bets on colours in a game called ‘Colour Prediction’ and would win or lose.
The case came into light after several complaints regarding the gaming portal were registered with the police.
Anjani Kumar said, “We got two complaints wherein Rs 97,000 and Rs 1,64,000 was siphoned. The amount looked small but when we investigated we found this racket is big and the modus operandi is different.”
Shikha Goel, the Additional Commissioner of Hyderabad Police said, “The websites and the programmed gaming is such that at first, you will feel you are winning but slowly you lose money for sure. Not only gaming, these Chinese are also enticing gullible Indians to dangerous dating apps, phishing and fleecing money.”
While investigating, the Hyderabad police found that the domain names of the gaming websites were based in China while data hosting services were cloud based in the United States. The entire technical operation of the online gambling game was run by China based Yah Hao and three others.
The payments were being made through Indian payment applications like PayTM and Cash Free. The gaming websites were controlled by a company named Beijing T Power Company, located out of China.
According to sources, there were 28 such complaints from all over India and the group was planning to register a company in cayman islands.
The total value of the inward transaction on the two accounts is Rs 1100 crores, majority of payments took place in 2020.
Most of the remittances have been transferred to different accounts some of which are overseas. Total overseas remittances are worth Rs. 110 crores.
The Hyderabad Police filed a case under section 420 and section 120 (b) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC,) and the Telangana Gaming Act.
Stay tuned for further updates.
