Read this story in Bengali

NEW DELHI: One man, living in a tiny village in Jharkhand , was allegedly behind one of the biggest vishing rackets in the country, with callers trained by him having duped more than one lakh people by posing as customer care executives of banks or the RBI.Ram Kumar Mandal , 35, a Class X dropout, had trained about 200 youths from the village to pose as bank executives and extract account information from gullible customers in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Goa, police said.One man, living in a tiny village in Jharkhand, was allegedly behind one of the biggest vishing rackets in the country, with callers trained by him having duped more than one lakh people by posing as customer care executives of banks or the RBI.Ram Kumar Mandal , 35, a Class X dropout, had trained about 200 youths from the village to pose as bank executives and extract account information from gullible customers in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Goa, police said.Cops said the racket had been running with the help of Maoist groups for the past four years. Police reached the village while probing a vishing case registered at Delhi’s Anand Vihar, in which a woman was duped of Rs 1.9 lakh after she revealed her OTP to a caller who claimed to be an RBI official helping her to link her Aadhaar card. The moment the victim revealed the OTP, the money was found to have been transferred to an e-wallet.“A team led by DCP Nupur Prasad was formed to track the source from where the e-wallet was being operated. One group was tasked with finding the location from where the e-wallet was being accessed, while others were trying to trace the operator,” said Ravindra Yadav, joint commissioner, eastern range.Vishing is the practice of gaining access to financial information and passwords of individuals over the phone.How cyber con managed to dodge cops for so longMeanwhile, cops contacted the e-wallet service and blocked further transactions from the account. They were also able to revert Rs 40,000 into the account. Police officers said the e-wallet service provider can usually transfer back a sum of money if the transaction had happened within 24 hours of the case being reported.“It was found that the rest of the amount was transferred to the Jodhpur Vidyut Vitran Nigam. The money was used to pay bills through the e-Mitra counter, a privategovernment partnership to pay utility bills,” said DCP Prasad. The transfers were made by the owner, Surendra Singh, police found.Singh was detained and questioned during which it was found that the money was transferred to the e-wallet by one Shabir Ali, who stays nearby. Singh would collect cash from his customers and paid their bills through ewallet. Shabir would later collect the cash from Singh after paying a 5% commission.Shabir would then deposit the cash in his bank account and transfer the amount to one Mukesh, a resident of Karmatar village in Jharkhand, through his e-wallet account, which was also accessed by Mandal. Police say the trail was created in such a way that the money never reached Mandal directly, which kept him out of the police radar.Mandal would use the money to pay “salaries” to the callers and order electronic products online. Police said he used to get the products delivered to the addresses of a relative, who had rented out houses in Shahdara and Bawana in Delhi, and some areas of Mumbai.Police found that Mandal owns 20 bank accounts which had Rs 3 lakh in them transferred from the e-wallets. Some of the money was also invested in buying silver and gold jewellery.Cops said the racket was running since 2016, after Mandal trained a few youths from Karmatar village, near the Jharkhand-West Bengal border. Mandal would employ a few of his trainees to make calls on his behalf. Many of his other trainees had opened their own vishing networks operating from their houses in the village.