Three suspects were arrested late last week in Pimpri Chinchwad, Maharashtra, India, following a probe by the city’s cyber police, for links to international cybercriminal organisations. The trio reportedly ran a cybercrime operation, managing mule accounts to funnel cryptocurrency to masterminds based in China and Nepal.
The investigators were originally probing a case in which an individual was cheated out of over $72 thousand in a share trading fraud involving a WhatsApp group and a fraudulent app through which the payment was made. This investigation led to a bank account belonging to a delivery driver based in Pune who revealed that their account was opened at the behest of other individuals who possessed the entire account kit. The investigators then followed some technical leads to Lonavala and, following a thorough combing operation, arrested the three suspects.
The suspects included a med school dropout, an individual who worked for a digital marketing firm, and a sales executive. The Med School dropout, alias ‘Com King’, was put in contact with the international cyber criminals by his friend who has a history of criminal activity. Com Kings is believed to have played a major role in large-scale cyber operations that managed hundreds of mule accounts to funnel money to cyber criminals by harnessing the Tether cryptocurrency. The suspects operated from Chhatrapati Shambhajinagar and Pune, running the operations under aliases given to them by the criminals for whom they were laundering money.