Its straight from the Bollwood flick “Special 26” as a gang of ingenious cheats created an e-mail and impersonated as top ranked CBI officers and threatened their targets to deposit money in a special account. The people behind this gang were familiar with the functioning of the CBI as they knew the details of people being investigated by the agency in some big cases.
Alarmed after getting the information about the modus operandi of this gang, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered an FIR against unknown persons for allegedly cheating people by impersonating as top ranked CBI officers and using computers as their resources for running their nefarious activities. The unidentified accused persons had created fake email account in name of CBI, opened a bank account, and issued summons to various people, who are being investigated by the agency, in a bid to extort money from them.
The FIR was registered at Economic Offences Unit after two months internal probe by the agency’s top investigators. Sources said that the matter came to light on January 10 of this year. Seasoned investigators were put on job to identify the people and also their modus operandi.
The FIR has been lodged on the statement of a Superintendent of Police (SP) level officer States and it states that they received information in Delhi and other places about some unknown persons pretending to be the CBI officers who were sending summons to people by a fictitious email account.
“In order to cheat the public by personating CBI, the suspects by means of the aforesaid email ID were allegedly sending mails to various people and threatening them to pay purported statutory fees for clearances (in the cases against them),” the FIR stated.
The accused also threatened the victims stating that their bank accounts of the victims will be confiscated. “The defrauded amount were allegedly received into the account opened in State Bank of India,” the FIR stated.
“They impersonated as top officials of CBI, including the Director and they were involved in illegal activities,” sources said. They even sent summons to their targets and also threatened them to deposit money in the bank accounts to escape being punished.
“Interestingly, the accused were well versed with the cases in which the victims were involved,” said the sources adding that the few victims involved in high profile cases were duped in the name of Director CBI. During two months internal probe, the investigators could find that the said domain of the email ID was registered with M/s Ascio Technologies by Mike Brown with address of Chattarpur Marg in Delhi.
“Sleuths are probing the gamut of this fraud as the people involved in this well organised gang appeared to be well versed with the functioning of the agency”, the sources further added.