Sangam Yadav was reel-watching on Instagram when an advertisement for some basic work-from-home jobs stopped his thumb. He ended up in a group on the private messaging app Telegram, where a woman posing as an employee of a company offered him paid online tasks. It was simple work, and he was paid too, before the whole thing turned on its head.
The Delhi Police Cyber Crime team has arrested a man person from Jagraon town in Punjab’s Ludhiana district after busting a cryptocurrency racket that duped people on the pretext of offering work-from-home opportunities, news agency ANI has reported.
This man, Sukhpreet Singh, 25, was the “woman employee” who was giving work at first to Sangam Yadav and others. The Delhi Police registered a case on October 5 in Shahdara based on a complaint by Sangam Yadav.
Yadav told the cops he received relatively small payments for completing basic product rating tasks. He said he was later tricked into depositing a total of ₹55,100 through UPI. When he tried to withdraw his “earnings”, he was asked to pay additional charges, leading him to realize that he had been defrauded.
Police said they have traced the money trail and found that ₹29,500 of the amount had been swapped for cash at a petrol pump in Jagraon in Ludhiana. Mobile location analysis showed that an individual identified as Sukhpreet Singh was behind it. Upon being caught, he revealed that he was an active member of a Telegram group where he traded in USDT (a form of cryptocurrency), police further told ANI.
He purchased USDT at market prices between ₹94 and 98, and sold it within the group at ₹105 per USDT. He was aware that the amount in rupee that he received in return would be cybercrime proceeds. So, to avoid detection, he used multiple accounts to withdraw cash or make swaps at petrol pumps, investigators claimed.
Police seized three mobile phones, six SIM cards, and 12 ATM cards from him during the two-day police custody remand. He has since been sent to judicial custody.
As for next steps in the probe, officials said the defrauded money was distributed across several accounts, with one belonging to an Indian Bank account holder who remains untraced.