Delhi Police CyPad busted search engine that cheated people with online sale of gadgets, apparels
New Delhi, August 18
Delhi Police CyPad busted search engine that cheated people with online sale of gadgets, apparels. More than 10,000 people cheated of around Rs. 25 crores in the last three years.
The accused have been identified as
Vijay Arora from Paschim Vihar, Manmeet Singh from Nilothi Extension, Rajkumar from Bijwasan, Pradeep Kumar from Rani Bagh and Avtar Singh from Nilothi Extension.
The CyPad had received multiple complaints were received in CyPAD where the victims alleged that they had ordered a ‘Tablet’ from the website ‘www.bookmytab.com’ after an advance payment of Rs. 3,699 or Rs. 3,999, etc., but the product was never delivered. All their efforts to contact the alleged website to get a refund went in vain.
The police scanned the website was scanned and a web-search regarding more complaints against the website was conducted. It was learnt that the said website was being used to dupe people at a very large scale and several complaints were also found online on various fora.
The officials said that analysis of the mobile numbers was done, the money trail was established, assistance was taken from the labs of CyPAD and the location of the accused was zeroed in.
The cyber team conducted a raid at the location of the main accused Vijay Arora and incriminating material was also recovered from his office, including inferior quality products. Subsequently, his operations managers and campaign manager involved in Search Engine Optimization to push the fraudulent websites online, were also arrested. The details of the persons arrested are:
The cyber officials said that the main accused Vijay is a Hotel Management graduate from Meerut. He had initially worked in a five-star hotel in Lucknow for almost 10 months after his graduation. After that, he started his own company as a courier aggregator for several online shopping companies from which he got the idea of creating fake shopping websites to make easy money. He gave shape to this idea almost three years back and since then, he has created more than 60 fake shopping websites. These websites offer electronic goods like mobile phones and tablets or clothing items like Denim jeans, T-Shirts, etc., at throwaway prices, thus enticing large number of customers to pay affront.
However, after receiving the payment, they do not send the product. If pressed hard by the victim for refund, they used to send an extremely inferior quality product to try and make it look like a consumer dispute, officials further said.
Pradeep is the main online campaign manager of the entire operation who uses Search Engine Optimization techniques to advertise and push the fraudulent websites online. He has, so far, created over 30websites for Vijay. Pradeep used to be paid on a commission basis. Thus, he used to get Rs. 250 per victim who purchased a mobile phone or a Tablet. Pradeep is a B-Tech graduate from Karnataka and is extremely well-versed with latest technologies.
Some of the websites created by the accused are ‘bookmytab’, ‘The Ripped Jeans’, ‘Dailyposhak’, ‘Denimtee’, ‘Femidukan’, ‘Jacobdenims’, ‘Naridukaan’, ‘Parabazzar’, ‘Slimfitcollection’, ‘Thesquarezone’, ‘vastralayas’, ‘bookamobile’, ‘yourmobile’, etc.
The agency is still investigating the case further. The police are trying to identify the involvement of others.
