₹1.07 crore cash, 103 phones and tables, 79 ATM cards seized by Lucknow Police in city's biggest cyber fraud bust
According to a report by The Hindustan Times citing officials, the breakthrough came during a joint raid by the Crime Team (DCP East) and Gudamba police in a residential flat in Lucknow's Jankipuram on Wednesday.
Cops arrested 16 people — 12 from Chhattisgarh and four from Gujarat — after the raid, allegedly linked to a massive cyber fraud.
According to commissioner of police, Lucknow, Amrendra K Sengar, the accused were running a pan-India online betting scam to defraud people of lakhs.
The arrested people were identified as — Pramod Sahu (25), Sajid Ansari (24), Khemendra Sahu (23), Sohail Ashraf Khan (28), Tikesh Kumar Yadav (23), Sachin Kumar Gupta (24), Rakesh Kumar (50), Rakesh Prahlad Patel (50), Govind Bhai Mangaldas Prajapati (50), Govind Bhai (31), Abhay Mishra (22), Ansh Sharma (21), Shankar Bag (22), Vinayak Chauhan (24), Mohan Singh (29), and Vijay Sahni (23).
'Forged Aadhaar cards, several SIM cards and communication logs have been recovered. The accused used rented identities, making it difficult to trace the money trail,' ACP Ghazipur Anindya Vikram Singh said.
Here is a list of items police recovered in the Lucknow betting app case ₹ 1.07 crore in cash
1.07 crore in cash 103 mobile devices like smartphones and tablets
79 ATM cards
22 bank passbooks
13 chequebooks
two note-counting machines
14 Aadhaar cards, some of which were reportedly forged
According to Lucknow Police, the accused used a fake betting platform named 'Lotus Gaming' to run the massive cyber scam, where they first targeted users on Telegram and asked them to join a private group. They then asked them to download the app that resembled legitimate betting portals.
The gang would run this app from the backend, showing frequent small wins and big losses.
Victims of the fraud were asked to pay token amounts, which were transferred into multiple accounts, many of which were opened using fake identities.
'These accounts mostly belonged to poor individuals who had handed over their banking credentials for money. The entire system was layered to evade detection,' DCP East Shashank Singh said.
The online betting scam allegedly ran via a structured two-layer network where front-end players interacted with victims and backend handlers managed transactions.
The gang used both real and fake identities and quickly moved across accounts, withdrawing cash from ATMs, in order to bypass detection.
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