40 youths arrested in Nuh for cyber fraud in the biggest crackdown since last year. Raids assisted by i4C app, uncovering forged documents and involvement in sextortion cases. Various IPC sections registered against the accused.

GURGAON: A total of 40 youths were arrested from various parts of Nuh in the last 48 hours in connection with many cases of cyber fraud registered across the country. Till late on Sunday evening, raids were still being carried out in the district, police said.

This is the biggest crackdown on cyber cons since the arrest of 66 youths in an operation by around 5,000 cops on 14 villages in April last year.

Nuh had then earned notoriety as ‘new Jamtara’, a reference to the small Jharkhand town that became the epicentre of online frauds and the basis of a plot for a Netflix series.

Officers said the latest arrests were carried out with the help of the Integrated Cyber Crime Coordination Centre’s (i4C) ‘Pratibimb’ app, which flags the real-time phone location of a fraudster.

State police chief Shatrujeet Kapur said Pratibimb gave the cops information about the location of 594 cyber frauds from across the state. Of them, 101 (18%) were found to be around Nuh and the bordering Rajasthan town of Alwar. The live location of the accused and their phone numbers were shared
with local police and the cyber crime coordination centre in Panchkula. The raids, which started on Saturday, are still continuing.

“So far, we have arrested 40 youths from different areas of the district. Most of them are in their 20s and early 30s,” said Vimal Rai, an inspector at cybercrime police station.

Asked about their network, Rai said the youths were involved in conning people in Telangana, Gujarat, Bengal, Karnataka, Delhi and Haryana. “Multiple SIM cards and forged Aadhaar cards were recovered from them. Their details will be matched with data stored with I4C to find out how many cases they were
involved in,” he added. A total of 50 cellphones and 90 SIM cards procured with forged documents
were recovered from the 40 accused.

Kishan Kumar, a spokesperson for Nuh police, said the youths targeted people with a varied modus operandi, such as morphing images taken during video calls or putting up bogus ads.

“Some of them were involved in sextortion, while others lured people to invest in sham schemes with the promise of lucrative returns. Some even reached out to their targets with fake ads on social media that offered to sell cows or work from home jobs,” he added.

Till Sunday evening, 18 cases were registered against the youths under IPC sections 419 (cheating by impersonation), 420 (cheating), 467 (forgery of valuable security or will etc), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 471 (using as genuine a forged document).