Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Odisha police has arrested another accused Tarun Dudeja for his involvement in cheating people through a fake loan mobile app, the police said on Sunday May 15. Earlier, the police had arrested Mohd Javed Saifi, proprietor of IWT India, from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.
The EOW has also frozen an amount of Rs 6.57 crore in different accounts of IWT India.
The duo was arrested on the basis of complaints filed by victims and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) relating to illegal functioning of loan apps Koko and its sister version called Jojo, which are not registered as non-banking financial companies (NBFC) under the RBI Act. More than 1.5 lakh people including many from Odisha have downloaded the two fraud loan Apps.
The EOW has seized 41 pre-paid SIM cards from the possession of Tarun, who is the proprietor of six shell companies.
Tarun along with Saifi used to lure poor people to allow them to open bank accounts and take SIM cards using their name. These accounts were used to channelise the money collected through illegal loan apps, said the EOW officials.
The mobile numbers connected to these bank accounts were actually handled by the fraudsters, not by the genuine account holders. They adopted this mechanism to create extra layers to confuse the police, they said.
During investigation, the EOW also found that the apps offered small loan amounts ranging from Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000 to its customers through their bank accounts through UPI or a link.
After the money was credited to customers’ bank accounts, officials of the two apps asked them to return the loan amount at a high rate of interest within a week. When the customers confronted them over the high-interest rate, the officials began harassing them, they added.
