Bhubaneswar: The Special Task Force (STF) on Sunday arrested three persons for allegedly selling and sharing one-time passwords (OTP) to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents for creating fake accounts in social media and e-mail IDs.
The accused have been identified as Pathanisamant Lenka (35), who is an ITI teacher, Saroj Kumar Nayak and Soumya Pattanaik. Police said they received a tip off about the accused and conducted raids in many areas. Following which, Pathanisamant and Saroj were arrested from Nayagarh district and Soumya from Jajpur district, STF officials said.
During the raid, STF seized 19 mobile phones, 47 pre-activated SIM cards, 61 ATM cards and 23 SIM covers from the trio. It has been learnt that the accused were also in contact with a Pakistani agent who was arrested under the Official Secrets Act in Rajasthan last year in a honey trap case.
Jayanarayan Pankaj, IG, STF said that the accused used to fraudulently procure a huge number of SIM cards in the names of different people. Then would then sell the OTPs and links generated using the SIM cards to various clients including ISI agents in Pakistan and their counterparts operating in India.
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In the process, the accused would receive payments from the agents. OTPs would also be sold to cyber frauds who used those to create accounts or channels on social media like Whatsapp, Telegram, Facebook and Instagram, STF officials said. Besides, OTPs were used for online shopping sites like Amazon, Flipkart and others as well as in opening e-mail accounts.
Apparently, there was nothing irregular in these accounts as they were linked on Indian mobile phone numbers. But, these accounts were actually being operated from Pakistan, officials added. According to STF, these social media platforms were used in various kinds of anti-India activities like spying, communicating with terrorists, radicalization, running anti-India propaganda along with fueling anti-India or divisive sentiments on social media, sextortion and honey-trapping.
