Bhubaneswar: The STF of Odisha Crime Branch has nabbed one more accused in the OTP-sharing scam in which three persons, including a teacher, were earlier arrested for allegedly sharing OTPs with operatives of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents in Pakistan.
The accuse, identified as Pradyumna Kumar Sahoo of Nayagarh, was arrested on Wednesday.
According to an official release, Sahoo is a graduate and earlier worked as territory sales executive with Idea and as Jio Point manager. Currently, he is engaged at Black Buck, a Fastag company.
“He had supplied/sold more than 500 pre-activated SIMs and 150+ pre-activated Paytm Wallets to Pathani Samanta Lenka who was arrested earlier in this case. These SIMs and wallets were sold to various cyber criminals and Pakistani Intelligence Operatives (PIOs). Some of the SIMs and wallets were also used by PIOs/ISI agents including some based in Pakistan’s Karachi and Baluchistan,” it added.
Investigation revealed that the accused used to generate multiple SIMs on the same identity by fooling/tricking the unsuspecting customers/SIM buyers on the pretext of some technical issues/glitches. “It was learnt that for activation of different wallets – PhonePe, Google Pay and others – registered mobile numbers linked with the Bank Account are mandatory. But in case of Paytm wallet account, costumers can also share user ID and password with others (having different mobile number) for operating the said account once OTP verification is activated,”
The STF will study/analyse this and if needed, will write to Paytm to change the settings, it added.
Last month, raids were conducted and three accused persons, identified as Pathani Samanta Lenka (ITI Teacher), Saroj Kumar Nayak and Soumya Pattanaik were arrested for allegedly fraudulently procuring huge numbers of SIMs in the name of others and selling the OTPs (linked/generated using the SIMs) to various clients including some PIOs/ISI agents in Pakistan as well as in India. In return, they were paid by some Pakistani agents based in India. They were also in touch with a woman Pakistani agent, who was arrested last year under Official Secrets Act and in a honey-trap case in Rajasthan.
In their greed for making quick money, they were selling OTPs and mule bank accounts to cyber frauds and foreign nationals for at least one year.
These OTPs were being used to create various accounts/channels on social media like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and also on online shopping sites like Amazon and Flipkart. These are also used for opening email accounts. These social media platforms operated by Pakistan-based agents were used for anti-national activities like spying, communication with terrorists, radicalisation, running anti-India propaganda, fuelling anti-India and divisive sentiments. Since these accounts were registered/linked on an Indian mobile number, people found them trustworthy.
Apart from these, they were also in the business of creating and selling mule accounts through social media groups which are again used in various kinds of crimes, the STF added.
Notably, National Security Act (NSA) has been invoked against Lenka, the alleged mastermind of the scam. He had allegedly gone into hiding after a suspected ISI agent Guddu Kumar was arrested by West Bengal police in December last year.
