The fraud of Rs 16,000 crore, bigger than the PNB scam, shocked the senses.

Mumbai (Uttam Hindu News): A digital payments company looked at one of the millions of transactions done daily and found that it was a fraudulent transaction worth more than Rs 16,180 crore. It was even bigger than the Punjab National Bank scam of January 2018, which involved top diamond traders. This case has put Thane Police in a dilemma. The massive scam was officially exposed on October 9 by Srinagar Police Station, Thane, which registered an FIR after a complaint was lodged by SafeXpay Technology Pvt Ltd, Thane.

Police investigators said that SafeXpay’s payout platform was allegedly hacked by some unknown entities, and subsequent investigation revealed that at least Rs 16,180 crore had been misappropriated, some of which was sent abroad. Are. Ravi Gupta, founder-CEO of Thane-based SafeXpay, said the scam came to light around April when four merchants from Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported suspicious discrepancies between bank balances and system balances.

A careful internal investigation by SafeXpay’s financial operations teams found that the login of one of the four merchants had been compromised and further found that the suspicious transactions were not theirs. SafeXpay, which is said to handle more than 100,000 transactions every day, immediately reported the matter to the beneficiaries and the banks concerned, as well as initiated procedures to stop the illegal transfer of funds in the so-called ‘golden period’.

Gupta said, this cyber crime resulted in a loss of Rs 25 crore and Safexpay, shocked by the revelations, immediately lodged a complaint with the Thane Police Cyber ​​Crime Investigation Cell and the National Cyber ​​Crime Portal on April 20. The company subsequently filed a detailed FIR at Srinagar Police Station with detailed evidence and other materials on June 16, 2023. Taking corrective measures during the ‘golden period’ helped SafeXpay save about Rs 7 crore after detecting a fraud of Rs 25 crore on its payments platform, Gupta said.

SafeXpay engaged cyber experts, forensic auditors and others to conduct a comprehensive system analysis of how the hackers entered the system and siphoned off the money, their modus operandi, and analysis of beneficiary accounts, and submitted a detailed report to Thane Police. Went. The Thane Police investigation revealed fraudulent transactions worth at least Rs 16,180 crore carried out by different entities using various fake bank accounts and completely unrelated to SafeXpay. Police said the amount of Rs 25 crore reached the HDFC Bank account of Thane-based company Riyal Enterprises, which has five branches in Thane and Navi Mumbai.

Real Enterprises’ investigation revealed that around 260 accounts in different names in different banks were allegedly used to carry out the financial fraud. “A detailed investigation of the bank statements of these 260 accounts has led to an estimate of a huge misappropriation of Rs 16,180 crore, a part of which has been transferred to foreign accounts,” Thane Police said. Thane Police has so far arrested two people, Amol Andhale alias Aman and Sameer alias Kedar Dinghe. The teams are searching for Sanjay Singh and Jitendra Pandey among others.

The police suspect that many more people are involved in the big racket of opening bank accounts with fake documents and running units with fake papers with the intention of defrauding the banks and the government. “In the wake of the fraud, SafeXpay has now implemented greater monitoring by various teams, enabling additional alerts (4 hours instead of 1 hour) for any suspicious transactions on the platform, vigilance at system levels, real-time monitoring and Has tightened its system with forensic investigation.