CBI charges two Chinese nationals in ₹1,000-crore pandemic investment fraud case

NEw new delhi: The telephone exchange Bureau of investigating (CBI) said on midweek that it has filed a bill sheet against two Chinese nationals who allegedly ran an investment fraud in India during the Covid-19 pandemic that saw ₹1,000 crore being stolen 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 yield very high returns.“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,” said a CBI officer who asked not to be named.The accused, Wan Jun and Li Anming , came to India to set up the company and infrastructure, then left it and operated the company remotely from abroad, he said.The agency said in a statement that the duo is 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 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’s statement said.Investigations, it said, revealed a massive intricate web of operations in which all the 27 people involved were unmasked. CBI filed a charge sheet against 30 entities including the two Chinese nationals, 25 individuals and three companies.“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 one Dortse successfully created several shell companies including Shigoo Technologies,” the CBI statement said.The agency’s investigations showed that the shell companies set up under the umbrella of Chinese firm Jilian Consultants became a conduit to collect and launder the proceeds of crime of major organized cyber frauds with over ₹1,000 crore moved within months through its accounts.“These frauds were connected and controlled by a single organized 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.