New Delhi:The Delhi Police has arrested five men and claimed to have busted a search engine optimisation scam that pushed multiple fraudulent e-commerce websites for duping people, police said on Thursday. Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.The accused have been identified as Vijay Arora (37), a resident of Paschim Vihar; Manmeet Singh (29) and Avtar Singh (32), both residents of Nilothi Extension; Rajkumar (30), a resident of Bijwasan; and Pradeep Kumar (32), a resident of Rani Bagh.
More than 10,000 people were cheated of around Rs 25 crore in last three years, the police said. According to the police, they received several complaints where the victims alleged that they had ordered a tablet from www.bookmytab.com after an advance payment of Rs 3,699 or Rs 3,999, but the product was never delivered.
Police scanned the website and learnt that it was being used to dupe people at a very large scale and several complaints were also found online, a senior police officer said.
"During investigation, the location of the accused was zeroed in. A raid was conducted at the location of main accused Arora and incriminating material and inferior quality products were recovered from his office," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Cyber) Anyesh Roy said. Later, his operations managers and campaign manager, involved in search engine optimisation to push the fraudulent websites, were also arrested, the DCP said.