Panaji: The Enforcement Directorate (ED), probing an alleged digital arrest scam, has uncovered a sophisticated money-laundering network designed to systematically convert cyber-fraud proceeds from legitimate-looking bank credits into cash and, ultimately, foreign currency.The investigation reveals that the money was not retained by the immediate accused but was funneled through an organised financial apparatus which existed for a single purpose—to convert the proceeds of cyber-fraud, received as ordinary banking credits, first into cash, and thereafter, into foreign currency, using companies which held licences of the Reserve Bank of India as full-fledged money changers.ED, Panaji, has arrested Fahim Moin Hussain Sayed and Naim Mueen Sayyed in connection with the alleged digital arrest case. Both were produced before the special court (PMLA), Goa, and have been remanded in ED custody for five days.The ED took up the investigation based on an FIR registered by Goa police’s cyber crime cell, in which a resident of Goa was subjected to a fraud known as “digital arrest”. She was made to believe that she was under investigation, was kept under continuous surveillance over a video call, and was thereby coerced into transferring Rs 2.6 crore into accounts falsely described to her as “secret supervision accounts”.The ED said that the victim’s money was moved within hours through a first layer of dormant and newly-opened bank accounts and was then fragmented across more than 400 beneficiary accounts through transfers, cash withdrawals, self-cheques, and payment gateways.The directorate said the trail led beyond that layer to an interconnected group of commodity, trading, travel, and foreign-exchange entities.“Those entities have together undertaken banking transactions exceeding Rs 27,850 crore and have deposited approximately Rs 2,904 crore in cash, of which Rs 584 crore was deposited through 61,448 separate transactions at bulk note acceptance machines across a large number of locations—a scale and a pattern of cash handling wholly inconsistent with any ordinary business,” said the ED.It also said that the investigation has established that the bank accounts of these entities are the subject of 330 victim complaints and 163 DIR across 20 states and Union territories, involving an aggregate reported loss of Rs 417.4 crore.“In 101 of those complaints, the money of a single victim was routed into two or more entities of the same group in the course of one and the same fraud, establishing that the accounts operated as a common pool rather than as separate businesses,” said the ED.The investigation has also revealed that the companies through which the proceeds were routed were incorporated in the names of persons of very modest means—including employees, drivers, and residents of single-room tenements—who were shown on record as directors, while the bank accounts and the affairs of those companies remained under the control of others.
