Hyderabad: In the continuing crackdown against the dubious instant loan apps cheating and harassing people, the cyber crime wing of Hyderabad police has arrested a Chinese national who was trying to escape from the country.
27 year old Zhur Wei alias Lambo was arrested at the Delhi airport almost a week after raids across many cities in India exposed a massive fraud and extortion running into several billions dollars which was transferred out of the country in the form of bitcoins.
Arrest of Lambo, who hails from Xiangxi province, has taken the criminal investigations by the police of Telangana, Haryana, Karnataka and many other Indian states close to the alleged Chinese brain behind the operations.
Earlier Hyderabad and Cyberabad police had arrested 17 Indian operatives working for the dubious companies and running call centers from Gurgram and Hyderabad as part of the massive operations first luring the unsuspecting people to get instant loans on exorbitant rates of interest ranging from 20 to 50% and then harassing and threatening them if they default on repayment.
Police officials said that Lambo was the operation head of several instant loan apps being run by four companies Aglow Technologies Private Limited, Liufang Technologies Private Limitd, Nabloom Technologies Private Ltd., and Pinprint Technologies Pvt Ltd.
Hyderabad city police commissioner Anjani Kumar said that these apps were available on Google Playstore and notices have been issued asking Google to take them down immediately.
The companies were registered at Bangalore and they had Indian directors. 17 people already arrested include many officials working at Hyderabad and Gurgram call centres.
Call centers
“The callers would take instructions from their superiors in Jakarta, Indonesia. The entire operation of these loan appas appears to be run by Chinese nationals, just like we had found during the investigation into multi million color prediction game fraud busted earlier”, Anjani Kumar said.
Police have arrested K Nagaraju from Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, a US educated accountant in connection with the instant loan frauds. He was one of the main brains behind the call centers which employed 1,100 people to sell the loans and then make threatening calls to the defaulters.
“The fraud was so well organized that these companies will send fake notices in the name of Central Bureau of Investigation and other agencies demanding the repayment of the loans. They would even send legal notices and FIR copies”, a senior police official said.
Police investigations revealed that the operation was so widespread that 140 million transactions involving a whopping Rs 21000 crore (3 billion US dollars) took place through these apps in the recent months as they were many willing borrowers of instant loans. They also included a large number of international transactions involving bitcoins.
In a similar operation Cyberabad Police also arrested one K Sharath Chandra, a US did his masters from USA, who had developed several loan apps such as Cash Mama, Loan Zone, Dhan Dhan and was running companies like Onion Credit Pvt Ltd and Cred Fox Technologies. His companies had agreement with nine Delhi based Non Banking Finance Companies (NBFC) to provide and recover bank loans with out any legal permissions.
