EOW FREEZES Rs 6.57 CRORE IN ILLEGAL DIGITAL LENDING CASE

Bureau,Odishabarta

EOW Bhubaneswar has frozen an amount of Rs 6, 57,34,829/- of four numbers of accounts of Mahagram Payments Pvt Ltd in the course of Investigation of EOW Ps case No 9 dated 21.04.20122 u/s 294/506/507/420/467/468/120 IPC & 66 D of IT Act.

EOW BBSR, had received a series of complaints from victims and Reserve Bank of India relating to illegal functioning of loan apps which are not registered as NBFC under Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Act. Economic Offences wing (EOW) Bhubaneswar took up investigation in respect of one such loan APP “KOKO”. This also has a sister/ related version called “JOJO”. More than 1.5 lakh people have downloaded this APP including many from Odisha.

During investigation, it is ascertained that these fake loan apps once downloaded in one’s mobile Playstore, small amounts ranging from 3000-5000 is credited through link or through UPI to the customers Bank account. Once the amount is credited to the customer’s Bank account, within a week the customer is asked to repay the amount along with an excessive rate of interest. On denial to pay the high rate of interest, the concerned customer is humiliated in many ways.

Obscene messages and indecent pictures along with abusive texts are sent to his whatsapp number and as well as to his contact list. During further investigation, it was ascertained that the victims who had downloaded KOKO loan APP from the Play store were credited small amounts from one company named Mahagram Payments Private Ltd which is not registered with RBI as an NBFC. The accused company through its recovery agents placed whatsapp and live calls to the victims humiliating/ abusing them with foul language to return the money with upto 5 times rate of interest within a week. The accused company credited the said amount but collected the refunded amount from the victims through one of its customer firms namely IWT India , Gurgaon. All the said transactions were made using many layers to avoid/confuse the police/ law enforcement agencies. In this regard, as the first step to prevent further extortion and illegal money lending by the said accused company and its customer IWT India, EOW has frozen an amount of Rs 6.57 Crores in different account of accused company.