Odisha EOW freezes Rs 1.22 crore of ponzi app ‘Join Trade’

Bhubaneswar: The Odisha Economic Offences Wing (EOW) has frozen Rs 1.22 crore of a fake trade app Join Trade, an official said on Thursday.

Using morphed pictures of leading Bollywood actors like Akshay Kumar and Manish Paul, the Join trade- Financial growth app claims to provide instant profit with minimal investment of money, said EOW SP, Dilip Tripathy.

It came to the fore that more than 1 lakh people have downloaded the fraudulent app, which claims to be a professional financial trading and wealth management platform with different investment schemes with minimal deposit of Rs 100 to Rs 20,000, he said.

During further inquiry, the EOW found that the investors can deposit amount only through UPI IDs reflected in the app which keeps changing constantly each minute and such IDs were linked to savings bank and current accounts maintained in the name of many shell companies and individual persons.

Layering was used for transacting the ill-gotten money by transferring the bulk credit amount to further unknown accounts maintained in the name of firms/companies and individuals, Tripathy said.

So far, the EOW has found five bank accounts having a total transaction of Rs 18.67 crore. Of the five, three accounts were maintained in the name of big firms/ companies based in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Delhi.

And all the above noted mule accounts which were opened in the name of individuals and companies were maintained mainly in YES Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and IDFC First Bank. These accounts were operated by the fraudsters mostly through internet banking.

A total amount of more than Rs 1.22 crore was frozen by EOW from the above cited bank accounts. The EOW has also written to Google to remove the app from Google Play Store.

(IANS)