In an alarming development, the Hyderabad Police has busted an online gaming racket and has arrested four people including a Chinese national.
A case has been registered under section 420 and section 120 (b) IPC, and the Telangana Gaming Act.
The arrested Chinese national has been identified as Yah Hao, the head of operations for south-east Asia.
The incident is said to be more alarming because some Chinese nationals are obtaining business visas and indulging in such fraud activities across India. Recently, cases of suicides due to online betting were reported from Telangana and other parts in the country.
As per investigation carried out by Hyderabad police, it was found that online gaming was being organised by initiating prospective gamers through Telegram groups. Entry is by reference only and members who introduce a certain member are paid a commission on the lines of MLM (multi-level-marketing ). On these groups, the admins will indicate the websites, which changes daily, where the registered members play games and place bets.
“We got two complaints wherein Rs 97,000 and Rs 1,64,000 was siphoned. The amount looked small but when we investigated we found this racket is big and the modus operandi is different,” Anjani Kumar, Hyderabad Police commissioner said.
The domain name servers of the gaming websites are located in China and the cloud-based data hosting services are based in the United States. The entire technical operation is run by China-based directors/partners of these companies.
The payments are routed through India based payment service providers like Paytm and other cash free mediums. These fraudulent companies are controlled through a firm called “Beijing T Power Company” based out of China.
“The websites and the programmed gaming is such that at first, you will feel you are winning but slowly you lose money for sure. Not only gaming, these Chinese are also enticing gullible Indians to dangerous dating apps, phishing and fleecing money,” informed Shikha Goel, Additional Commissioner (Crimes), Hyderabad City Police.
Till now there are 28 such complaints from all over the country and the group was planning to register a company in cayman islands. The total value of the inward transaction on the two accounts traced so far is nearly Rs 1100 crore, majority of which took place in 2020.
Most of the remittances have been transferred to different accounts some of which are in overseas. Total overseas remittances known as of now is Rs 110 crore.
