CBI files charge sheet against 2 Chinese nationals, 28 others in investment fraud case

NEw new delhi: The exchange Bureau of investigating (CBI) said on wed that it has filed a bill sheet against two Chinese nationals who allegedly ran an investment fraud in India during the pandemic, in which over ₹1,000 crore were siphoned off through shell companies.The agency said Shigoo Technology Pvt. Ltd., owned and controlled by Chinese nationals, allegedly cheated the public during the Covid lockdown using a fake mobile application titled ‘HPZ Tokens’, claiming that investments would be used for cryptocurrency mining and would yield very high returns.The CBI has filed a charge sheet against 30 entities, including the two Chinese nationals, 25 individuals and three companies as investigations revealed an intricate web of operations.“Investigation found that this was not an isolated incident but part of a large, well-coordinated cyber crime network operated by foreign nationals. This syndicate was responsible for several cyber scams targeting Indian citizens in the post Covid-19 period using loan apps, fake investment apps and platforms offering bogus online job offers,” a CBI officer said.The Chinese nationals — Wan Jun and Li Anming — had come to India to set up the company and infrastructure, following which they left the country and operated the company remotely from abroad, the CBI officer said.The agency said in a statement that the duo never joined the investigation and remain absconding.“The syndicate was the fountainhead of several scams through which gullible citizens were cheated using a host of loan applications, fake investment apps and platforms offering bogus online job offers. When the CBI took over the investigation, it immediately cracked down on its local operations, arresting six persons — Dortse, Rajni Kohli, Sushanta Behra, Abhishek, Mohammad Imdhad Husain and Rajat Jain,” the agency statement said.“Wan Jun was the director of a company, Jilian Consultants India Private Limited, which was a subsidiary of a Chinese entity, Jilian Consultants. Wan Jun, with the help of Dortse, successfully created several shell companies including Shigoo Technologies,” the statement added.The agency said that the shell companies set up under the Chinese umbrella, Jilian Consultants, became a conduit to collect and launder the proceeds of crime, with over ₹1,000 crore moved within months through their accounts.“These frauds were connected and controlled by a single organised criminal syndicate based overseas. The probe also exposed an organised and sophisticated use of payment aggregators which were in nascent stages of operations in India,” the agency said.