Bengaluru City Police have arrested 10 men involved in a sophisticated online stocks trading scam, which swindled a private company employee out of Rs88 lakh. The victim was promised high returns on his investment after being lured into downloading a fraudulent app called ‘Brandy Speed’. Between October 10 and November 9, he transferred money in several installments into the app. However, he soon realized he had been scammed and filed a police complaint.
Despite the masterminds of the operation being based abroad, the arrested individuals were operating out of offices in Yeshwantpur and Tyagarajanagar, Bengaluru. These operatives facilitated the fraudulent transactions, routing the victim’s money through more than 230 mule bank accounts. The accused managed to withdraw the funds quickly, but police recovered no money during the arrests.
The suspects arrested in connection with the scam have been identified as:
Srinivas Reddy,
Akash GM
Prakash H
Sunil Kumar
Sai Prajwal alias Somu
Ravi Shankar
Madhusudhan Reddy
Suresha V
Kishore Kumar
Obula Reddy
The police seized 51 mobile phones, 480 SIM cards, 27 debit cards, 48 QR codes from various banks, and passbooks from 230 mule accounts. It was found that these bank accounts were involved in over 1,400 cybercrime cases across the country, with 15 of them linked to Bengaluru alone.
While the masterminds of the scam remain abroad, Bengaluru police are working on tracing and extraditing them. The arrested suspects are primarily low-level operatives who were responsible for handling the money transfers and laundering the funds through mule accounts. The police continue to investigate the connections to the international crime network behind this scam.