The city police on Monday caught another youth involved in a lottery SMS racket. The youth identified as one Darshan Prajapati, 20, was arrested by Anandnagar police. Prajapati is said to be a key link between the racket’s local network and the mastermind, suspected to be from Mumbai, and used to communicate with the latter using popular social networking sites.
Prajapati, a resident of Abadnagar in Bopal area, is the son of a driver. Prajapati was previously a student of Indian Institute of Hardware Technology located at Om Tower in Satellite. The police had arrested two of Prajapati’s aides in the racket, Jitendra Rao and Ravi Raval, on December 29. On Monday, Anandnagar police nabbed Darhshan near Bopal and also seized the computers and laptops of the trio.
Upon interrogation, Darshan confessed to having hired the other two to work for him. He also admitted to paying them anywhere between Rs10,000 to Rs45,000 per month as commission depending on the money they brought in through the lottery SMS racket.
When interrogated further, Darshan told the cops that he started out working with the Mumbai-based mastermind as a supplier of Direct-to-Home (DTH) recharge coupons.
The SMS racket came to light when branch managers of a PSU bank had reported similar incidents of accounts being opened with them using forged documents last week. In the racket, the gang would send bulk SMSes to mobile phone users from across Gujarat, Rajasthan, MP, UP and Maharashtra and other states.
The SMS would notify users that they had won a lottery and were required to deposit a particular amount as processing fee to avail of the same. Raval and Rao had opened the accounts to receive this ‘processing fee’.
