New Delhi: The Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Operations (IFSO), the Special Cell of Delhi Police, with the arrest of two persons, claims to busted a PAN India syndicate involved in duping “gullible” persons through fake e-commerce websites.
The arrested accused were identified as Ravi Arora and Dinesh Sharma.
Recently, the Delhi High Court clubbed around 28 writ petitions filed by various companies related to such frauds and entrusted the task of investigating these matters to the IFSO.
DCP, IFSO, K.P.S. Malhotra said that the accused had created fake commercial websites in the name of aggarwalandsons.co.in, hindsolution.co.in, bansaltraders.com, sunsolar.com and various others and cheated “gullible persons all over India to the tune of around Rs 60 lakh”.
The official said that one Kushal Sharma filed a complaint wherein he alleged that he surfed on internet for websites to buy an air-conditioner (AC) and found one — aggarwalandsons.co.in.
He then contacted on the mobile number given on the website. Thereafter, he made a payment of Rs 28,472 through digital wallet to buy one LG AC. When no AC was delivered to him within the stipulated time as assured by the company, he again contacted on the mobile number given on the website but the mobile phone number was found switched off.
“A special investigation team was constituted. So far, 10 cases have been registered and a large number of bank accounts, in which the cheated amounts have been received by these fraudsters, have been frozen,” said Malhotra.
The High Court has directed that NPCI, DoT, MeitY and CERT-In to conduct a meeting with officials of IFSO to enable coordination and cooperation between these agencies.
The complaint filed by Kushal Sharma was also taken up for technical enquiry. National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal was also analysed and found 32 more complaints against the website www.aggarwalandsons.co.in. Accordingly, a case was registered under appropriate sections of law and investigation was taken up.
During investigation, technical analysis and financial trail analysis was done by the team. On the basis of technical analysis, multiple raids were conducted in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh and the accused were held.
Further, during interrogation, it was revealed that accused would create and host fake e-commerce websites matching with the websites of renowned brands. They created the websites to cheat the gullible clients. They also used the Search Engine Optimisation to get reflected their websites on top of the search results. Whenever any customer searches online to deal in household items, their website would reflect on top after the search result.
Customer would visit their websites and find the prices of the household articles/electricals shown cheaper than the other renowned e-commerce websites. Customers would get attracted towards them and pay the prices but the articles were never delivered to them despite making payment.
Further investigation in the matter is on.
–IANS