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Jaipur, Oct 27 (IANS) In a major breakthrough, the Jhalawar Police in Rajasthan has busted an interstate cyber crime network that had infiltrated several central and state government welfare portals, including PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, Jan Aadhaar, Rajasthan SSP (Social Security Pension) and the Disaster Management Department’s DMIS portal.
Superintendent of Police Amit Kumar said the crackdown, codenamed “Operation Shutdown”, led to the arrest of six accused and detention of two others in Delhi, Punjab and several districts of Rajasthan, including Jaipur, Bharatpur, Dausa and Jodhpur. Police have so far frozen Rs 1 crore in 11,000 suspected bank accounts linked to the gang.
SP Kumar said the gang was involved in large-scale financial fraud worth crores of rupees by taking advantage of loopholes in government welfare schemes.
“It was an organized and well-connected interstate gang operating at both the state and national levels,” he said.
During the operation that began on October 22, police recovered Rs 53 lakh in cash, note counting machines, thousands of chequebooks, passbooks and ATM cards as well as 35 laptops, 70 mobile phones and data related to more than 11,000 bank accounts, SP Kumar said.
“Luxury vehicles including cars, motorcycles and tractors used by the accused were also seized,” SP Kumar said.
He said those arrested also include Mohammed Laiq (Jaipur), identified as the state nodal operator of PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, who is accused of creating unauthorized IDs by using his official credentials and carrying out illegal land seeding for ineligible beneficiaries.
“Subhash (Delhi) provided land seeding data for fake beneficiaries in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. Mohammed Shahid Khan (Bharatpur) is a former Land Development Bank employee who facilitated the fraudulent activities. Rohit Kumar and Sandeep Sharma (Jalandhar, Punjab) designed and managed cloned websites resembling government portals. Sunant Sharma has been identified as the main handler of the gang,” he said.
SP Kumar said two others, including Ramesh Chand (Phalodi Collectorate employee) and Bhag Chand (Dausa), were detained for facilitating bulk registration in Jhalawar district and enrolling the highest number of ineligible beneficiaries.
“The gang took advantage of dormant or inactive registrations of ineligible beneficiaries. The data collected from rural agents was sent to operators like Laik, who used the official credentials to generate unauthorized nodal IDs at night. These IDs were used to bypass OTPs and reactivate accounts for ineligible beneficiaries, before deleting or disabling the login IDs by morning. Government funds were embezzled overnight,” he said. Said.
SP Kumar said that in the DMIS portal, criminals misused the vulnerabilities in the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS).
“They accessed 1,500 SSO IDs and official emails from collectorates to patwaris to divert the compensation amount received by farmers to fake accounts. Forensic analysis of the seized devices revealed that sophisticated cyber tools were used to bypass Aadhaar verification and gain access to the e-Mitra Plus system,” he said.
SP Kumar said the police have also recovered thousands of pension payment orders (PPOs) and account details from social security schemes.
He said, “Suspicious fund transfers to over 17,000 beneficiaries have been detected in Jaipur, Jodhpur and Sikar, indicating widespread data theft and manipulation. To dismantle the network, a six-member Special Task Force (STF) was formed under Jhalawar Police with the cooperation of cyber forensic units and intelligence agencies in several states.”
He further added that officials say the investigation is ongoing and more arrests are likely as data analysis and inter-state coordination continues.
–IANS
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