Kolkata: Five men from Karnataka and Bihar were arrested in a Friday night raid on a housing complex near Santoshpur-Mukundapur off EM Bypass for running a loan racket, offering small-time businesspersons fake credit under Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY).
The accused, who earlier ran their racket in Gujarat and Delhi, operated out of a business complex in Kolkata for the past several months and stayed in adjoining complexes, police said.
The arrested are Amir Khan from Bihar and four from Karnataka—Rathin C D, Md Nizamuddin Siddiqui, Vilas Shinde and Madhusudhan H R. Police have seized 14 mobiles—eight of them android smartphones and six keypad phones—believed to have been used in the alleged operation, which involved offering to facilitate loans under the central govt scheme and extracting money or personal details through misrepresentation. Police said their investigation focused on the method used to contact victims, the flow of money and if additional members or handlers were involved. They are examining the digital records of the phones to identify victims and recover transaction trails.
A case was registered at the Cyber Police Station on Jan 7 following a complaint received from the East Jadavpur PS area. Local conduits, who ran fake call centres on this gang's behalf, had already been arrested in another similar case. Based on the interrogation of these people, police got the leads to the East Jadavpur residence and carried out the raid.
The accused have been booked under sections 66, 66C, 66D, 84B and 43 of the IT Act, 2000, and sections 61(2), 319(2), 318(4), 336(2), 336(3), 338 and 340(2) of the BNS, 2023.