The West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department (CID) unearthed an international money laundering racket in the state, which was duping people with fake lottery schemes and transferring the money to Pakistan. The police have also linked a food processing firm with it and arrested a director and an officer of the firm as well.
According to CID, many people across the state were getting calls and WhatsApp messages from phone number starting with +92 or 0092, the international calling code that belongs to Pakistan. The racketeers were calling people up or sending messages via WhatsApp telling them about winning a lottery – but the trick was elsewhere.
For ‘the lottery winners’ to access the huge amount of money won, they needed to pay a processing fee to get the money transferred – and the racketeers use to provide them with account numbers of various Indian banks. A CID official explained Anandabazar Patrika newspaper, “once a person fell for the trap and deposited the money to get the lottery amount transferred, the agents of the racket who were in India would withdraw the money and send it to Pakistan via Dubai.”
Money laundering in this manner is usually common with Nigerian gangs, said a CID officer, who were getting complaints about these incidents for quite some time now. “Initially we couldn’t link up the numbers with Pakistan. But we found the missing link once we arrested Umar, the kingpin of a cheques forgery gang.”
After interrogating Umar, the CID got to know how the money extracted by the cheque frauds was being sent to Dubai, Pakistan and Malaysia via Hawala networks. DIG CID (Operations) told ABP, “we got to know about the lottery money laundering from Umar and his associate Guddu.”
The CID then started tracking the accounts, while acting on a suo moto case registered at Egra police station of West Bengal’s East Midnapore district on January 13- where the processing money was getting transferred. The officers found out that the accounts holders often had no clue about the transactions – and someone else was using their account for a fee of Rs 5,000 per month.
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Much later the investigation agency noticed, how the money used to get transferred to few other accounts, from where huge amounts of money were getting transferred outside the country, with the help of Rajesh Ghosh and Bidhan Kirtania, the director and officials of Pran Beverages (India) Private Ltd. The duo was arrested on Saturday night and was produced at Contai court where they were remanded to be under police custody.
The officials who laundered around 55 lakh rupees in the past few months through Hawala channels – were charged under several sections of Indian Penal Code, and section 66 (D) of the IT Act. The residences of the two arrested and the head office of the company located at Chinar Park, New Town, was also searched and several documents have been seized.
A CID official informed ABP newspaper, that the racket seems to be quite big, and they are currently trying to apprehend in which other states of the country, the racketeers were operating and who are involved in the process. The central investigative agencies are also investigating the case now, who is not ruling out the possibility of the involvement of ISI-D company in this.