Odisha EOW cracks online ponzi cum betting racket; 2 held
The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) in Bhubaneswar arrested directors of a Kolkata-based shell company Hakim & Rustam Fabrics Private Limited from Shibpur in West Bengal's Howrah district on charges of defrauding over 800 investors in Odisha's Ganjam district.
user1
Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) in Bhubaneswar arrested directors of a Kolkata-based shell company Hakim & Rustam Fabrics Private Limited from Shibpur in West Bengal's Howrah district on charges of defrauding over 800 investors in Odisha's Ganjam district.
Rustam Khan and Md. Hakim have been identified as those arrested. To make quick money, the investors and thousands of others across India put money into 18football.com.
According to an EoW release, 18football.com is a hybrid model of fraud that uses the name of a football betting/gaming app to run a Ponzi scheme online.
The investors were required to open an account with "18football.com" either through an application or through an offline referral link and to wager money on specific football matches as specified on the website/app. The investors were also given so-called foreign "mentors" to help them with their betting. These mentors only communicated via Telegram or apps.
Investors are promised lucrative returns such as a 3% compound return on investment daily, recharge bonus, referral bonus, extra bonus on downline members' earnings, salary bonus, and daily withdrawal option, among other things. They were compensated with additional bonuses/commissions for introducing/recruiting new members.
To promote and entice the innocent public, the fraudsters were also engaging in promotional activities such as social work and charity in rural areas, giving it extensive publicity so that people would believe their scheme was genuine.
In the initial period, the fraudsters paid the promised return for some days to the investors but stopped making payments when the membership increased and closed the app "18football.com".
"The scammers used multiple shell companies/firms and their directors to route the ill-gotten money and also used mule accounts for multi-layering of money transactions to confuse law enforcement agencies. The two arrested have admitted to receiving a small commission to run this shell company.
"However, they used to receive orders/directions from one Md Sheikh Saifi from Dubai," according to the release.
The EOW has examined 17 of the over 150 bank accounts involved in this racket, and a total of Rs 108 crore in transactions has already been traced. It is suspected that the amount of money involved in this scam may exceed Rs 1,000 crore, according to the report.
