An online racket involving two Chinese nationals was busted with the arrest of three Indians who allegedly duped around 20,000 people across the country to the tune of Rs 50 crores by offering huge returns on investments, police said on Monday.
The trio, along with two absconding Chinese nationals, was accused of enticing the public by offering 4.5 times returns on deposits in 90 days, said Cyberabad Commissioner of Police, V C Sajjanar.
The police made the arrests acting on a complaint by a depositor. A case was registered and the Indians were arrested in Haryana and Delhi.
The police also froze 10 bank accounts with Rs 3 crore and seized four laptops and three mobile phones.
The accused have bene identified as Uday Pratap (41) who was the authorized signatory of the bank account of the firm Mobicentric Technologies that operated the website and the app of ciciseo, an app based on a form of Multi Level Marketing (MLM).
The other person arrested was Nitesh Kumar Kothari (36) from Dwarka, Delhi and Rajesh Sharma (36) from Gurugram. The two Chinese nationals have been identified as Zhang Hongwei alias Peter and Peng Guowei aka Javie.
One of the Chinese nationals, Javie left India and did not return while the other had never come to India. They, along with the trio, launched an app and started cheating people, according to the police.
Explaining the modus operandi, police said the accused through different WhatsApp admins across the country shared the information about the app inviting investments/deposits in their three schemes assuring 4.5 times returns on the deposits in 90 days.