Indian Internet scam raked in US$549m
Print Edition
INDIAN police have busted an Internet scam in which around 650,000 people lost a combined 37 billion rupees (US$549 million) after sending money to a firm that promised they would earn cash by clicking on web links, police said yesterday.
Police, who described the pyramid-style scheme as one of India’s biggest ever, said they had arrested three ringleaders on the outskirts of New Delhi and seized more than 5 billion rupees from bank accounts.
“They learnt that if you give some money back to members, the investments would go up exponentially,” said Amit Pathak, head of a police cyber crime unit in India’s populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
The men ran a series of websites that promised would-be subscribers a chance to earn 5 rupees each time they clicked or liked web links sent to their mobile phones, police said.
The unsuspecting investors each paid thousands of rupees into the company’s bank accounts to join the scheme, but the web links they received were fake.
The company running the alleged scam had operated for years, but earned almost all the money over a few months from last August, after it began to distribute some of the proceeds, using the beneficiaries to draw in more investors.
When police raided the company’s head office they found 250 passports of employees and members who had been rewarded with a holiday to Australia.
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