Bhubaneswar: The economic offences wing (EOW) of Odisha Police has arrested the owner of a ponzi scheme company which functioned in the garb of a digital company on the charge of duping a large number of people from Odisha with promises of huge returns from Brindavan.
Prince Kumar, who is a resident of Muzafaarpur in Bihar and the director of Digital Revolution Technologies Limited, has also been accused of giving false assurances to the people that their investments would double within one year although the company has no commensurate or real business activity to pay high returns, the EOW said.
He was produced before the chief judicial magistrate court in Mathura and is being brought here for trial.
A case has been registered against the accused for criminal breach of trust, fraud and forging, besides provisions of the IT Act, Prize Chits and Money Circulation Scheme (Banning) Act, 1978 and the Odisha Protection of Interests of Depositors (in Financial Establishment) Act, 2011, the agency said.
It was registered on the basis of an enquiry report relating to allegations that from March 2020 onwards Kumar and his company duped investors across Odisha with false assurances of high returns under its different schemes involving various digital and online products.
The EOW said that the company also issued forged documents and misappropriated about Rs 1.5 crore invested by the gullible people of the state. However, the sum is feared to go far higher as this company had investors from many states specially in Maharashtra, Bihar, UP, Delhi, West Bengal, Odisha and Chhattisgarh.
On the modus operandi of the company, the EOW said that it collected huge money from investors by misleading them that it was running successful Indian versions of Whatsapp, YouTube, Amazon, email, online/digital gaming, digital payment, Netflix among others.
The company had named its fraudulent ecommerce website as ‘Shopsubkuch’, mobile payment platform as ‘MYPay’, its app for watching movies ‘MyTube world’, video sharing App ‘Vidscop’, app for sharing messages, chats, voice and video calls ‘Chitthi’ and online gaming as ‘GoGame11’.
Kumar as the director of Digital Revolution Technologies Limited had conducted meetings at Balasore and Bhadrak, distributed brochures and made wide publicity to convince investors that the company wished to strengthen India through digital platforms and information technologies with the tagline ‘Your Own Digital Revolution Marketing’ and is committed to global digitalization.
It duped the people with its false promise that they can earn huge income in a very short period from home by using the company’s mobile applications which are solely made in the counntry.
The EOW said the people were more vulnerable during COVID pandemic as many of them had income related issues. This apart Kumar used glamorous propaganda techniques by using website, YouTube, Facebook among others. Investigation into the case is on, it added. —PTI