Kota, Oct 27 (PTI) Six more people have been arrested from multiple states in connection with an interstate cyber fraud network that infiltrated several central and state government welfare schemes, causing financial losses worth crores of rupees, police said on Monday.
The accused were held from Delhi, Punjab and Rajasthan’s Jaipur, Bharatpur and Jodhpur. Two government employees were detained from Rajasthan’s Dausa and Phalodi, officials said.
The arrests were made as part of ‘Operation Shutter Down’, launched by the Jhalawar police last week to crack down on cyber fraud in government welfare schemes.
Superintendent of Police (SP), Jhalawar, Amit Kumar, said the investigation has exposed a highly organised network that gained unauthorised access to portals, including PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi, Jan Aadhaar, State Social Security Pension, and Disaster Management schemes.
A special investigation team (SIT) seized large volumes of suspicious beneficiary data and digital equipment during the probe, the SP said.
During earlier raids, 30 people were arrested and Rs 53 lakh in cash, currency counting machines, thousands of cheque books, passbooks, ATM cards, 35 laptops, 70 mobile phones, details of 11,000 suspicious bank accounts, and luxury vehicles were recovered, he added.
Around 11,000 bank accounts with deposits of nearly Rs 1 crore have been frozen, Kumar said.
Among those arrested, Mohammad Laeeq, an operator at the state nodal office of the PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi in Jaipur, allegedly created unauthorised IDs and manipulated mobile numbers linked to district nodal IDs to reroute OTPs to agents involved in the fraud.
Another accused, Subhash, arrested from Delhi, sourced bulk data of ineligible beneficiaries and coordinated land seeding fraud in contact with the alleged mastermind, Ramavatar Saini, who was among those arrested earlier, police said.
Other accused include Mohammad Shahid, a former contractual employee of the Bharatpur Land Development Bank and two Punjab residents – Rohit Kumar and Sandeep Sharma – who allegedly developed cloned websites for PM-Kisan and other state welfare schemes.
Two government employees – Ramesh Chand, posted on deputation at the Phalodi Collectorate and Bhagchand – were detained for allegedly facilitating beneficiary entries in various schemes.
The SIT recovered more than 45 HTML programming files of the PM-Kisan portal, official SOPs of the Government of India, and lists of nodal officers with login IDs and contact details, indicating insider access.
Massive data of beneficiaries from multiple states, including around two lakh from Gujarat, 55,000 from Rajasthan and 40,000 from Assam, was also found, police said.
According to officials, the accused operated mainly during late-night hours to reactivate fraudulent accounts, divert funds, and deactivate the IDs before office hours to avoid detection.
A video recovered from an accused’s laptop showed real-time unauthorised access to the PM-Kisan database.
Police also recovered around 1,500 compromised Single Sign-On (SSO) IDs of government officials and pension data of more 50,000 beneficiaries.
The SP announced a reward of Rs 25,000 for information leading to the arrest of four absconding accused – Kuldeep Dholi and Raju Tanwar of Jhalawar, and Naresh and Vikram Saini of Dausa. PTI COR OZ OZ