NE NEWS SERVICE
AHMEDABAD, DEC 10
The Ahmedabad cyber-crime branch on Thursday arrested a man for allegedly acquiring fingerprint scans and Aadhaar card numbers in the name of Paytm KYC and selling the data to other fraudsters, an official said on Thursday.
The cyber-crime branch arrested Prashant Shah (37), owner of Utkarsh Human Resources in Ahmedabad, who had allegedly acquired fingerprint and Aadhaar data of several persons from Madhya Pradesh, the official said.
The accused then sold this data to fraudsters from Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, who had, in turn, used it to get jobs as agents in a payment solution firm, Easy Pay Pvt Ltd, he said.
Paytm, meanwhile, was not immediately available for comment.
According to an official release, Easy Pay, which has its office in Ahmedabad, is the authorised business correspondent partner for two private sector banks and provides banking services such as money transfer and bill payment, through agents in several states.
Easy Pay’s general manager Dharmendra Sodha had approached the cyber-crime branch on December 8 alleging that some of the agents had siphoned off Rs 18.94 lakh from various bank accounts, the release said.
If a customer needed cash, the Easy Pay agent would visit him, collect his Aadhaar number and scan his fingerprint, and if the data matched, the amount would get transferred from the customer’s bank account to Easy Pay wallet, while the agent paid the same in cash to the customer, it was stated.
These agents were hired only after the bank verified their documents, such as Aadhaar and PAN Card, which they needed to submit to get the job.
In October, one of the banks informed the company that one of the agents had cheated a customer of Rs 20,000, and subsequently, similar complaints started emerging.
A probe revealed that Rs 18.94 lakh had been deducted from the bank accounts of 91 customers, the release stated.
Shah’s men had set up kiosks in different parts of Madhya Pradesh and lured people by claiming that the government will give away a free bulb if they opt for Paytm KYC and after collecting fingerprints and Aadhaar data, they sent it to him in a pen drive.
The arrested accused then sent the fingerprint scans to Delhi for converting them into “hard fingerprints” and later sold the data to Delhi and Madhya Pradesh-based fraudsters, who got jobs as agents using that fake identity.
As per the release, they also used that data to siphon off money from customers’ bank accounts.
