Bhubaneswar: The Special Task Force (STF) of Odisha Crime Branch arrested one more accused in the OTP sharing scam linked to Pakistani Intelligence Operatives (PIO).
STF sources here Thursday said Pradyumna Kumar Sahoo (32) from Mahitama village under Nuagaon Police Station in Nayagarh district was arrested by STF Wednesday.
Earlier three accused —Pathanisamant Lenka, (35 ), Saroj Kumar Nayak alias Amit, (26 ) from Sakeni village under Dasapalla police limits in Nayagarh district and Soumya Pattanayak, (19 ) from Udayapur village under Sujanpur Police Station in Jajpur district were arrested by STF in this case.
Police seized 19 mobile phones, 47 SIM cards and 61 ATM cards from the possession of the three accused.
Sahoo is a graduate and had earlier worked as territory sales executive in Idea and as Jio Point manager.
Currently, he was working at Blackbuck Fastag Company. He had supplied/ sold more than 500 pre-activated SIMs and more than 150 pre-activated PayTM Wallets to Pathani Samanta Lenka who was arrested earlier in this case.
These SIM cards and Wallets were sold to various cyber criminals and PIO.
Some of the SIMs and wallets were used by PIOs/ ISI agents including some based or located inside Pakistan mainly from Karachi and Balochistan, STF said.
It was found that the accused used to generate multiple SIM cards on the same identity by fooling unsuspecting customers on the pretext of some technical glitches.
It was learnt that for activation of different wallets i.e. PhonePe, Google Pay and others, the registered mobile phone numbers (which are linked with the Bank Account) are mandatory but in case of Paytm wallet account, the customer once activated the same with OTP verification, can also share the user ID and Password to others having different mobile number for operating the said account.
STF said it will analyze this and if needed, will write to Paytm to change the settings.
Further investigation in this regard is on.
UNI