Bhubaneswar, May 11 (Representative) The EOW of Odisha Crime Branch police has unearthed a Ponzi App “Join Trade “ for cheating people through advertisements with morphed pictures of leading Bollywood actors like Akshay Kumar and Manish Paul. EOW sources here on Thursday said during the Investigation of a case the Investigating officer came across an advertisement on the internet about an App by the name Join Trade- Financial Growth claiming to provide instant profit with minimal investment of money. Their advertisements morphed the pictures of leading Bollywood actors like Akshay Kumar and Manish Paul, in order to mislead and instill trust in the Public. On further investigation, it came to the surface that the fraudulent App by the name Join Trade is downloadable in Google Play store and has 1 Lakh Plus downloads. The app is powered/ developed by Perfect Trade. The App claims to be a professional financial trading and wealth management platform with different investment schemes with minimal deposits of Rs 100-20,000.
During further enquiry, it came to the surface that the amount can only be deposited through UPI’ID’s reflected in the APP which keeps changing constantly each minute and such IDs were linked to savings Bank and current accounts maintained in the name of many shell companies/firms and individual persons. The EOW said layering was used for transacting the ill-gotten money by transferring the bulk credit amount to further unknown accounts maintained in the name of firms/companies and individuals. It said during the investigation five accounts were scrutinized having a total transaction of Rs.18.67 crores, out of which three accounts were maintained in the name of big firms/ companies based in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Delhi. It was further observed that all the noted mule accounts which were opened in the name of individuals and companies were maintained mainly in YES Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and IDFC First Bank. The enquiry revealed that the accounts were operated by fraudsters mostly through Internet Banking. During enquiry, a total amount of more than Rs 1.22 crore was frozen by EOW which has also written to Google to remove the App from Google Play Store.