Police bust gang that preyed on Indians with terror probe threat

Delhi Police have busted an international cybercrime syndicate that defrauded victims across India of nearly ₹100 crore by impersonating anti-terror officers and placing them under “digital arrest”, arresting seven people including a Taiwanese national who served as the operation’s technical backbone.

The arrests mark a rare victory in what has become a transnational game of whac-a-mole for law enforcement: such networks shift operations across Cambodia, Myanmar and parts of West Asia as quickly as authorities shut down one hub. Indian agencies busted a ₹1,000-crore syndicate in December 2025, yet thousands of fraud complaints continue to flood the National Cyber Reporting Platform.

The latest syndicate routed international scam calls from Cambodia into India using illegal sim box installations that masked them as domestic numbers, enabling fraudsters to evade detection while threatening victims with fake terror charges linked to the Pahalgam attack and Delhi blasts, police said on Saturday.

Deputy commissioner of police (Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations) Vinit Kumar said victims were told arrest warrants had been issued against them and their bank accounts would be frozen. “They were then placed under continuous video or audio surveillance, a tactic described as ‘digital arrest’, and coerced into transferring money to ‘verify’ their innocence,” he said.

The breakthrough came when investigators identified I-Tsung Chen (30), a Taiwanese national who police say supplied, installed and configured the sim box hardware across multiple Indian cities. Chen was arrested at Delhi’s international airport on December 21 when he arrived in the country, purportedly to troubleshoot one of the systems police had intercepted.

During interrogation, Chen allegedly admitted to smuggling sim box devices into India and deploying them across multiple locations, police said. Investigators linked him to a Taiwan-based organised crime network allegedly headed by gangster Shang Min Wu, with a history of kidnapping for ransom, large-scale fraud and money laundering across countries.

The investigation, launched in October 2025 after a spike in nationwide complaints, revealed the syndicate exploited low-frequency 2G networks, rotated IMEI numbers and merged multiple sim boxes to make calls appear to originate from different Indian cities within a single day, Kumar said.

Sim box devices convert international calls into local ones by routing them through Indian sim cards, allowing scammers to bypass telecom security systems and make fraud calls appear genuine. IMEI numbers are unique identifiers assigned to mobile phones; by overwriting and rotating these numbers, the accused made the same device appear as multiple phones in different locations.

After a month-long covert surveillance operation, police traced the first sim box setup to Goyla Dairy in southwest Delhi, leading to the arrests of Shashi Prasad (53) of Qutub Vihar and Parvinder Singh (38) of Deenpur, who allegedly maintained the illegal infrastructure.

Subsequent raids led to the dismantling of sim box hubs in Mohali, Coimbatore and Mumbai. In Mohali, Punjab, police arrested Sarbdeep Singh (33), a BTech graduate in electronics, and Jaspreet Kaur (28). Both had worked in Cambodia-based scam centres and were recruited by a Pakistani handler who allegedly funded and directed sim box installations in India, investigators said.

In Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, police arrested Dinesh K, a hotel management diploma holder suspected of handling cryptocurrency laundering. He had travelled frequently to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Cambodia to coordinate financial flows, police said.

The seventh accused, Abdus Salam (33), a civil engineering diploma holder, was arrested in Malad, Mumbai, after another sim box installation was detected and dismantled.

The case exposes a complex transnational command chain, with Cambodia serving as the training and recruitment ground, Chinese nationals supplying and configuring sim box hardware, a Pakistani handler facilitating funding and IMEI manipulation, and Nepal suspected to be the current operational nerve centre providing remote control, police said.

Searches across locations led to the recovery of 22 sim boxes, eight mobile phones, three laptops, seven CCTV cameras, three passports, Cambodia employment cards, 10 Indian sims and 120 foreign sims of China Mobile, according to police.

Forensic analysis conducted with the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre revealed over 5,000 compromised IMEI numbers and around 20,000 sim cards linked to the module, police said. Thousands of cybercrime complaints from across India were traced back to this network.

“This was not just cyber fraud but a serious national security concern. Further investigation is underway to identify remaining operatives, trace money-laundering and crypto channels, and dismantle the entire international architecture behind the sim box ecosystem,” Kumar said.