A Delhi court on Friday denied bail to a man accused of cheating Japanese citizens through tech support scams run from illegal call centres. The court stated that releasing him at this stage could alert his business associates.
Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Jyoti Maheshwari rejected the bail application of Kapil Ghakhar, who is linked to a network of cyber criminals that operated anonymously to avoid detection.
"The accused in the present case is an important link in the larger chain and his involvement in the offence has been clearly established as the recipient of the illegal proceeds of crime. The offence involved in the present case has transnational ramifications and involves the cheating of several innocent Japanese citizens, for which co-operation has also been sought from the National Police Agency of Japan," the judge noted.
The evidence in the case is digital in nature and is present on online servers, which can easily be tampered with or manipulated, due to multi-factor authentication, she added.
"Moreover, there is a strong possibility that if the accused is released on bail, at this stage, he may alert the other co-accused involved in the present offence which may derail the course of the investigation. This court is in agreement with the submissions of CBI, that if the accused is granted bail at this stage, he may alert his business associates/ accomplices, which is likely to lead to the destruction of crucial evidence in the present case," she said.
According to the CBI, the syndicate operated call centres designed to appear as legitimate customer service centres, through which victims were deceived into believing that their electronic devices were compromised and under that pretext, victims were coerced into transferring funds into mule accounts.
"It has been clearly stated in the reply to the bail application, that the accused did not reveal the source of receipt of bitcoins and the purpose for which the bitcoins were further sent by him. Therefore, the arrest of the accused was deemed essential on the ground of proper investigation," the judge said.
The CBI claimed that the searches resulted in the seizure of a trove of digital evidence, devices and documents "indicative of the large-scale operations of the syndicate".
The preliminary analysis of the evidence revealed that the scam employed advanced social engineering techniques and technical subterfuge to manipulate victims into extracting money under false pretences.
The perpetrators allegedly engaged in technical support scams by displaying fake virus alerts and pop-ups on malicious URLs on the screens of unsuspecting users, convincing them that their systems were infected.
The targets were then induced to call a specific number, where they were persuaded to install remote access tools that provided attackers with access to their sensitive financial information.
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