Gurgaon: An alleged cybercrime syndicate with links to Dubai was unearthed with the arrest of three men who cheated a retired Indian Air Force officer of over Rs 2.5 crore. Investigators said part of the laundered money was used to pay operators a fixed monthly salary and fund equipment for a SIM box operation.The complainant, a Wing Commander-rank officer residing in Palam Vihar, approached the cybercrime police station (west) on May 18, alleging he had been duped on the pretext of an investment opportunity.During the investigation, police traced a transaction of nearly Rs 15 lakh to a bank account registered in the name of Ascend Multitrade Private Limited, a Mumbai-based company. Four mobile numbers were linked to the account, one of which was active in Delhi. This led investigators to an apartment in Vivek Vihar, where the accused were tracked down.“The directors of the company will also be sent a notice and questioned about the details of the bank account,” said ACP (cybercrime) Gaurav Fogat.A police team raided the apartment on Wednesday and arrested Janak (27) of Vivek Vihar, Dinesh Kumar (30) of Bawal, Rewari, and Pawan Kumar (26) of Fatehabad. According to police, the three had been recruited by their handler six months ago and had been working closely together for the past couple of months, after becoming part of the network through Telegram.During the raid, 36 mobile phones, 53 ATM cards, 24 bank passbooks, five cheque books and two IP cameras were seized. Police suspect the cameras may have been used to monitor SIM-related setups linked to cybercrime activities, and believe the accused were in the process of establishing a SIM box operation — a modus operandi the city cyber police have cracked down on multiple times this year.A SIM box is a device that can hold multiple SIM cards — sometimes dozens at a time — and is typically used to route international calls through local mobile networks, allowing them to masquerade as domestic calls. In scam networks, SIM boxes allow fraudsters to generate or relay large volumes of calls and OTP-linked transactions while masking the true origin of the communication, making it harder for investigators to trace calls back to the people actually orchestrating the fraud.When the recovered data on accounts and mobile phones was cross-checked with Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), it surfaced 15 complaints from different states involving losses of roughly Rs 3.75 crore. These complaints were filed in Karnataka, Hyderabad, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, and police said more cases linked to the network may emerge.According to the ACP, the accused received money in various bank accounts and transferred it onward on their associates’ instructions, frequently changing their own locations to avoid detection. Pawan Kumar reportedly travelled to Dubai and stayed there for two months. “They are now in custody; their handlers and leaders will soon be arrested,” Fogat said.In exchange for their role in the operation, the accused allegedly received a monthly payment of Rs 25,000, along with bonuses tied to the amount of money they moved.
