Bhubaneswar: The Economic Offence Wing (EOW) of state Crime Branch arrested the India head of a Chinese earning app involved in an online ponzi scam, an official statement said.
S Chitravel, 31, was arrested from Aviyur near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, the EOW said in a statement. He was brought to Odisha and produced before OPID Court, Cuttack August 16 which remanded him to five days police remand.
The EOW said that the mastermind of this scam is Guanhua Wang, 40, of Hangzhou, China. He along with two other Chinese nationals (one male and one female) came to India in 2019 and stayed in Bangalore for a few months.
They created at least three shell companies based in Bangalore to run several cyber-financial scams. Chitravel was made director in one such company, namely ‘Bettec Technologies Private Limited’. During Covid, the trio went back to China but continued running the scam through Chitravel and some other such hired directors and facilitators.
Chitravel used to run the scam in India, the EOW said. Earlier, these Chinese people were operating illegal digital loan apps.
When many people committed suicide after being trapped in loans, law enforcement agencies launched a crackdown against Chinese loan apps and the government banned many such loan apps. “Money is being siphoned out of India… to China through these scams.
They generally use multiple layers of mule bank accounts at lower level, followed by current bank accounts of shell companies and finally, crypto traders and some dubious export-import firms to siphon money out of India,” an EOW official said. In some cases, small amounts have also been withdrawn in cash in Dubai.
PNN