A Pune- based fin-tech startup was duped of over Rs 50 lakhs by cyber fraudsters in the names of 95 celebrities including cricketers and Bollywood stars. The modus operandi was to obtain PAN card details from their GST Identification Numbers available online, replace the photo on the PAN cards with that of the fraudsters and then they got credit cards issued in the name of the celebs.
List of celebs includes...
The credit cards were issued in the names of celebrities, including Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni, Abhishek Bachchan, Shilpa Shetty, Madhuri Dixit, Emraan Hashmi, Saif Ali Khan, Alia Bhatt, Sonam Kapoor, Hrithik Roshan among others by the startup FPL Technologies Pvt Ltd which issues ‘One Card’.
Here's how they did it
The fraudsters forged PAN and Aadhar cards putting their own pictures on them for video verification. The tech-savvy fraudsters left the original PAN and Aadhaar numbers and the date of birth intact and uploaded the forged PAN card/Aadhaar card on the fintech app and the online system fetched the details online from the Credit Information Bureau India Ltd (CIBIL) based on the original PAN.
The Delhi Police arrested all the five accused identified as Puneet, Mohd Asif, Sunil Kumar, Pankaj Mishar and Vishwa Bhaskar Sharma.
Delhi Police Joint Commissioner of Police (Eastern Range), Chhayya Sharma said the accused forged government IDs of the celebrities to dupe banks of over Rs 50 lakhs.
“The loophole in the documentation and backend verification was exploited by the seamsters. All IT experts were very well aware that the first two digits of GSTIN are state codes and the next 10 digits are PAN numbers. Since the celebrities’ date of birth is available on Google, these two — PAN and date of birth — complete the PAN details,” explained a top Delhi Police official monitoring the investigation. He further added that the gang had access to all financial history from Credit Information Bureau India Limited (CIBIL).
One Card representative confirmed the credit card fraud and said, "We came to know about the fraud when our system got an alert that multiple onboarding attempts were being made using a single device. The accused tried to onboard by using 83 PAN details from seven devices."
The credit limit of the card used to be approved after “taking into account the details obtained from CIBIL, he added.
The company's complaint stated that by misusing the process, “the accused boarded with us by uploading their real-time selfie which matched with the photograph on the forged PAN card/Aadhaar card. Accordingly, credit cards were issued to the accused persons with an approved credit limit of Rs 10 lakh each. The approved credit limit was exhausted/withdrawn by the accused within a span of a week and nothing has been repaid to us.”
