New Delhi: The Home Ministry’s Security agencies busted on Tuesday a Pan India ‘fraud-to-phone’ network and arrested eight people and seized nearly 300 new mobile phones bought with stolen funds.

Security agencies identified 900 mobile phones, 1,000 bank accounts and hundreds of unified payment interface (UPI) and e-commerce IDs of this gang and are under investigation. According to the official sources nearly 100 bank accounts, and debit and credit cards have been frozen by the security agencies so far.

In all, eight ‘fraud-to-phone’ (F2P) gang masterminds, including four from Jharkhand, two each from Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, has been arrested and nearly 300 new mobile phones bought with stolen funds seized. The operation against the gang has covered 18 states, involving 350 people.

The F2P gang had several hundred operatives who ran different legs of a transaction which involved OTP fraud, credit card fraud, e-commerce fraud, fake IDs, fake mobile numbers, fake addresses, black marketing, tax evasion, money laundering and habitually dealing in stolen goods.

The Union Home Ministry’s Cyber Safety Wing FCORD, the Madhya Pradesh Police and police forces of several other states carried out on specific information. A case of cyber fraud of Rs 6.5 lakh was reported on June 11 by a 78 year old Udaipur resident on the CyberSafe app run by the home ministry.

The F2P caller was operating from Jharkhand. It came to light that funds were directly credited to three SBI cards, which were used to buy 33 China-made Xiaomi POCO M3 mobile phones from Flipkart, revealed the investigation.

The CyberSafe is an application created by FCORD, which is operational since August 2019. It links more than 3,000 Law Enforcement Authorities (LEAs), including police stations, in 19 states and union territories with 18 fintech entities online and in real-time. Fraudsters’ mobile numbers are the key to CyberSafe.

As soon as a victim informs police, information is entered on CyberSafe and in real-time, fund flows are identified and communicated. Till now 65,000 phone frauds have been reported on this app and 55,000 phone numbers and several thousand bank accounts of fraudsters identified. The CyberSafe runs a website cybersafe.gov.in, which provides access only to law enforcement authorities and fintech entities.