Delhi Police have arrested seven people and busted a cyber fraud network involving Rs 3.93 crore — yaani nearly Rs 4 crore — unearthing a foreign money-exchange app and a hawala channel allegedly used to convert cheated money into USDT, officials said on Wednesday.

Source: PTI via TelecomLive

According to the police account, the arrests revealed an alleged network that arranged mule bank accounts, withdrew cash and transferred the suspected proceeds of crime through multiple layers so the money trail would be harder to follow. All of these claims are allegations at this stage and have not been proved in court.

149 transactions flagged in the case

A Delhi news roundup of the same police action reported that the gang allegedly defrauded Rs 3.93 crore through 149 transactions, with the investigation still under way as of Tuesday, October 27.

Source: LatestLY

Police said the foreign money-exchange app and the hawala channel were allegedly used to convert the cheated money into USDT, a dollar-linked cryptocurrency token. Moving funds from bank accounts into crypto through informal hawala channels is a method investigators say fraud networks use to push money across borders outside the regular banking system.

Mule accounts — bank accounts opened or rented in other people's names and used to receive and forward fraud money — sit at the centre of the alleged operation, according to officials. Account holders whose accounts are used this way can themselves face criminal liability, police have warned in past advisories.

Further investigation into the source and destination of the money is under way, officials said. The arrested persons have not been named in the reports available so far, and no court outcome has been reported yet.