Bangladesh
Digital Loans Digital interest business controlled from China, five fraudsters arrested by DB police
Dhaka, October 9: The Cyber and Special Crime Division of the Dhaka Metropolitan Detective Police has arrested five members of a gang involved in digital fraud using an interest scheme on social media and various apps.
At first, the campaign starts on social media, talking about giving 'loans'. The admins of these pages themselves start making appreciative comments in the posts as ‘lenders’ and ‘borrowers’. Links to apps are provided. Many people, who are interested in borrowing, install these apps. Then, documents and personal information, including NID, are collected along with a token money as service charge. The amount is at least Tk 500, which is to be paid through mobile banking. This amount is not refundable. Those lucky get the loans at high interest rates, while many do not. But this process of app-based digital microfinance is completely illegal in the country. Even then, there are some pages and apps in the country, which are controlled through servers in China.
Some unscrupulous people in the country have been running this illegal business with China for a long time. It is estimated that at least seven lakh people have been deceived.
The arrested are Emanuel Edward Gomez, Arifuzzaman, Shahinur Alam alias Rajiv, Shubho Gomez and Md. Akram. The web-based crime investigation team of the detectives arrested them from Dhanmondi, Banani and Mirpur areas of the capital on October 5 and 6. A case has been filed against them at Dhanmondi police station.
The lawsuit alleges that app-based illegal lenders tempted to provide unsecured loans to unemployed people during the coronavirus pandemic. They manipulated the information of the borrowers through apps. With these documents, they also blackmailed the victims. Excessive amount of money was recovered against the loan.
The cycle begins with fraudulent lending through e-transactions. He also said that they have agreements with some financial institutions of the country. But all this is part of their deception. There is no validity of such loan scheme in the country. In addition, the personal information they collected was going to the Chinese through apps.
DMP Additional Commissioner AKM Hafiz Akhter said they had illegally collected customer information. As soon as the customers installed the apps, they would take permission to capture pictures and videos, contacts, location, status, message collection in the mobile camera. In this case, the personal information of the customer would be read in the extreme security threat.
