Hyderabad police arrest two in fake loan app case

The accused has been identified as Shabbir Alam and Umakanth Yadav, residents of Bangalore who were running the call center at Koramangala, Bangalore in the name of Sky links Technology Private Limited.

The accused has been operating the loan apps Ocean Rupee, Life Wallet, Maloo Wallet, Elephant cash, Box Cash, and Dutta Rupee with the supervision of Chinese National Mr. Chen Chaoping presently who resides in China.

According to police the accused hosted the apps in Google Play Store and when someone used to download these apps, they access the permissions of the gallery, contact list, and locations and provided the loan for short period. "After that, they will call the victims to pay the loan amount in very huge interest, when the victims incapable of repaying the loan amounts, they will start threatening that they will posts their photos in social media platform by morphing their photos," said the police.

They are involved Cr. No. 1995/2021 & 2018/2021 of PS Cyber Crime, CCS, Hyderabad.

The case came into light after a woman filed a police complaint on December 12, 2021 at Rathibowli police station. In her complaint, she has stated that she has taken loans of around Rs two lakh from different loan applications which were available on the Google Play Store. The apps gave her seven days' time for repayment of loans but she failed to repay in time.

The customer care of the apps started calling her from different Whatsapp numbers and abusing her and threatening her. "They also calling to her colleagues and relatives & they threatened that they will give her number to 500 different men. Hence, she requested to take necessary action in this regard," said the complainant.

Modus Operandi

According to police, in 2020, the Chinese National Chen Chaoping operated the Loan Apps call center in the name of Golden Bag Technologies Private Limited in Bangalore. The present accused Shabbir Alam worked as Supervisor and Umakanth Yadav worked as IT Manager the call center.

With the arrests made by the Cyber Crime Police, Hyderabad City in the months of December-2020 and January-2021 the Chinese national fled away to China to avoid arrest and closed the Call Centre. After 2 months the Chinese national again contacted the accused Shabbir Alam and Umakanth Yadav and instructed them to run the call center by introducing new loan apps.

Based on the instructions of Mr. Chen Chaoping accused hired about 100 tele-callers and opened a new call center at Koramangala, Bangalore, and trained the tele-callers how to extort the money from the victims in all possible ways.

The police seized 29 mobile phones, 73 laptops two Debit Cards of Sky links Technology, and two Hard discs