Uttar Pradesh: Two fraudsters arrested by cyber cell

LUCKNOW: Two tricksters who posed as treasury officials to dupe retired government officials were arrested by Uttar Pradesh Cyber cell on Sunday. Five members of their gang are still at large.
The duo identified as Pramod Mandal and Mantu Kumar Mandal had duped several persons in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha, Rajasthan.
Cyber cell sleuths said that in UP alone the fraudsters had duped innocents of Rs 5 crore in the last one year.
They were arrested from Kolkata in West Bengal by cyber cell on Saturday night. Cops also recovered different SIM cards, bank ATMs, Bluetooth sound systems, from their possession. Pramod belonged to Dumka in Jharkhand, and Mantu was from Dhanbad in the same district.
The cyber cell of the UP police got active after it received complaints from retired police pensioners of being fleeced. Pensioner Chhote Lal was duped of Rs 11 lakh, while Ram Lakhan Chaudhary of Rs 10 lakh, and Udayveer Singh of Rs 10 lakh were all defrauded in a span of just three months. It was not just police personnel who were duped but also retired officials from other departments.
Several similar complaints were reported in the district cyber cell units of Lucknow, Hardoi. In Lucknow, a retired secretariat official was defrauded of Rs 53 lakh.
Additional Director General of UP Cyber Cell, Ram Kumar, said Pramod Mandal was the mastermind who had 36 cases of duping retired government officials. Kumar also said the arrested duo used to call their targets while impersonating themselves as treasury officer or officer looking for the pension and other allowances that a retired employee used to get from the department.
“In this way they easily tricked the target and used it to secure the password of their ATM or details of the bank account. Thereafter, the money was transferred in e-wallets which they encashed,” said Kumar.
Another police official privy to the probe said that each member in the gang is assigned a particular work like getting fake bank accounts opened, procuring fake SIM cards, making calls to victims, informing about police movement and for bank work to encash the money obtained through fraud. They were given the share of money as per the importance of their work.
Police said Pramod had formed a gang employing several of his kin and his distant relatives.