More than 10,000 were defrauded for about Rs 25 crore in the past 3 years, police said. (representative)
New Delhi:
Delhi police have arrested five men and claimed to have discovered a search engine optimization scam that pushed multiple fraudulent e-commerce websites to defraud people, police said on Thursday.
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to a website or web page from search engines.
The suspects have been identified as Vijay Arora (37), a resident of Paschim Vihar; Manmeet Singh (29) and Avtar Singh (32), both residents of Nilothi Extension; Rajkumar (30), native of Bijwasan; and Pradeep Kumar (32), a resident of Rani Bagh.
More than 10,000 people have been defrauded for about Rs 25 crore in the past three years, according to police.
According to the police, they received several complaints with the victims claiming that they ordered a tablet from www.bookmytab.com after a prepayment of Rs 3,699 or Rs 3,999 but the product was never delivered.
Police scanned the website and found that it was used very widely to defraud people and several complaints were also found online, a senior police official said.
“During the investigation, the suspect’s location was mapped. The location of the main defendant Arora was raided and incriminating material and products of inferior quality were found in his office,” said Deputy Police Commissioner (Cyber) Anyesh. Roy.
Later, its operations managers and campaign manager, who were involved in search engine optimization to push the fraudulent websites, were also arrested, the DCP said.
Arora started his own company as a courier aggregator for various online shopping companies where he came up with the idea of creating fake shopping websites. In the past three years, he has created over 60 fake shopping websites. These websites offer electronic goods or clothing at disposable prices, the police said.
However, after receiving the payment, they do not send the product. If a victim asked for a refund, they would send an inferior quality product, they said.
Pradeep Kumar graduated in BTech in Karnataka and is well versed in the latest technologies. He is the chief online campaign manager of the entire operation using search engine optimization techniques to advertise and put the fraudulent websites online. He has created more than 30 websites for Arora so far, police said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NewsMadura staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
