Machilipatnam (Andhra Pradesh): The SIT team formed by the Krishna district police arrested five accused in the loan app harassment cases filed at the Penamalur and Atkur police stations here. The accused belong to Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana. The special investigation team (SIT) found that the accused are running their illegal loan app services by using servers based in Pakistan, Bangladesh, China and Nepal.
Krishna district Superintendent of Police P Joshua disclosed details of the arrests at a media conference in the Machilipatnam SP office on Thursday. He said it was surprising that the arrested accused did not know each other. The modus operandi of this gang is to send UPI links and offer loans without any documents. Then they start harassing victims through phone and video calls from different States. The arrested persons were identified as brothers Rahul Singh and Rohit Kumar of Ghaziabad (UP), Jay Shankar Upadhyay of Ayodhya district (UP), Abhishek Kumar Sinha of New Delhi and Akhtar Hussain of Hyderabad. The SP said that around Rs 23 lakh in the bank accounts of the accused were confiscated.
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The SP said a week ago, some main accused were arrested from Kalyan in Maharashtra. As a continuation of this, the five persons were arrested from Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida. They were found to have started extorting money from loan recipients. After granting loans through apps, the agents are harassing and cheating customers by forcibly collecting more money in the form of instalments even after the loan is cleared.
SP Joshua said that these loan app fraudsters had no direct association and they work only through mobile and bank accounts. Some of these agents were made to open current accounts through which loan EMIs were collected. These agents do not even know that the accounts opened in their names are used for online extortion, which is a punishable crime. Such agents are falling into the trap of loan app operators for the commission they give.
