Scamsters are always looking for various pathways to get their stolen stash around without much trouble and attention raised as well. In the capital of India, the Delhi Police is facing some very tough situation as the scams in the capital are on the rise with ever innovative plans to lure the victims but the part which is making the cases even harder for them is that the scamsters are now using crypto as the new route to work with their foreign associates and also hide the money trail.
In India, the legality of cryptocurrencies is highly debated and regulation in the field is not as strong at the moment. Delhi Police's Cyber Crime Unit are finding cryptocurrencies being the means for illegal transactions very fast which is posing a lot of difficulty in the investigations because of the tech behind cryptos making them quite hard or next to impossible to track.
As per senior officials in Delhi Police, there are mainly three types of scams that the scamsters deal in crypto - fake call centers, gift card scams and using Chinese Apps.
- In July, police busted a fake call center where they arrested 4 men who used to cheat people on the condition on giving them loans which they converted into cryptocurrency. As per reports they were inspired with YouTube videos and even contacted a Chinese national through telegram who was involved in loan cheating to learn how to dupe people.
The police says, they not only want to catch the cyber criminals but also recover the financial losses involved but with crypto currency into the mix, it make it difficult to track down as the transactions are anonymous. With bank transactions, the money trails can be detected and also freezing transactions is a way which is not the case with crypto.
- Another very popular instance is the gift card scams. In this year alone over 50 cases have been registered. In this method the gangs do use photos of top police officials from Delhi Police and message their subordinates asking to buy instant gift cards. They are aware of the hiearchy system in agencies, a constable would surely not say no to a DGP level officer and would buy their cards without confirming. The cards are immediately converted to various crypto coins.
- In April, the authorities arrested 8 people from Delhi and some other parts of the country and busted a multi-million cheating and extortion syndicate. They used a fake loan app and tried luring users to install it for securing easy loans. They later would use their personal information to harras them or threaten them to extort money.
The police says, one of the accused was caught with Rs 80 million which was converted into crypto and was sent to their associates in China/Dubai which was later to be paid to everyone.
All in all, it has been a very big headache for the Delhi Police and the Cyber Crime Units for a while now. Scamsters are using the loopholes in the Indian regulatory rules for Crypto and duping people every day. The nature of crypto also does not allows the authorities to track anything regarding the transactions which would help them to recover any funds that the victims lost.
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