Kolkata, Jan 31 The Bengaluru Police on Friday arrested two persons including a Trinamool Congress leader in Nadia district of West Bengal in connection with an online forgery rackets involving crores of rupees.
The arrested individuals have been identified as Pinku Mondal, a former Trinamool Congress village panchayat representative and his close associate Kamaluddin Hasan.
Both have been taken on transit remand back to Karnataka. Both were arrested following a joint operation by the sleuths of Bengaluru Police and Nadia district police.
An official of the district police said that a number of incriminating documents including multiple ATM cards, bank passbooks and mobile phones were seized from their procession.
Trinamool Congress' district leadership has clearly said that the party will not take responsibility for the personal misdeeds by Mondal.
"If the accused is guilty, he will be punished as per the legal provisions. However, the party will not take any responsibility for anyone's personal misdeeds,” said Trinamool Congress' organisation district president and party legislator Rukbanur Rahman.
It is learnt that the Bengaluru Police started an investigation in the matter in December last year, following a complaint received at their cyber-crime division of an online forgery involving little less that Rs 5 crore.
Investigation revealed that Nadia district mainly and adjacently Murshidabad district party were bases of this forgery racket. However, district police said that they suspect that Mondal and Hasan are merely cogs in the wheel and someone more influential is the main brain behind the racket.
Recent findings both by state and central agencies specialising in combating economic offenses have revealed that West Bengal, especially in and around the state capital of Kolkata, is often becoming the choicest hub for setting up operational bases for inter-state online forgery rackets where the targets are even foreign residents.
Last week, the officials of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) busted such a racket in West Bengal by conducting parallel raid and search operations at 10 such operational bases of the rackets mainly operating from in and around Kolkata.
The racket was involved in defrauding overseas citizens under the pretext of providing them with software-related services through fake call centres and thereafter diverting the proceedings collected abroad in the form of cryptocurrencies.
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