Hyderabad police on Wednesday arrested a Chinese national Zhu Wei, who was heading 4 companies which provided instant loans through their mobile application. The mastermind, also known by his alias Lambo, was arrested at the Delhi airport minutes before he was to board his flight.
Zhu Wei was on his way to Shanghai via Frankfurt. His Indian colleague, K Nagaraju, was arrested from Delhi.
So far, the cops have arrested 4 Chinese nationals out of which, three people, Yi Bai, Liang TianTian and the recently arrested Lambo were directly connected to the instant loan app scam. The 4th one, The fourth, Yah Hao, was arrested in August in connection with running an online gambling racket in which a large number of Indians had lost crores of rupees.
Lambo had been missing eversince his colleagues were arrested. The Hyderabad police had him on his radar for some time and finally caught hold of him at the airport right when he was about to fly off. The culprit denied every link with the loan app scam but his farce was broken once his laptop was accessed and important information was collected.
Lambo headed 4 different companies whose services ran via 7 call centres, two each in Gurugram and Bengaluru and 3 in Hyderabad. The tele-callers were trained to harass people unable to repay loans taken at extremely high-interest rates.
As harassment increased, people started killing themselves off pressure because of the non-payment or delay of the loan amount. 3 people took their life including a software engineer and a government employee.
The questioning of Nagaraju revealed that Lambo reports to another Chinese national, Yuan Yuan, alias Sissi, alias Jennifer, who set up the operations in India. She is believed to be in China. Investigations have also revealed that companies like Aglow Technologies Pvt Ltd, Liufang Technologies Pvt Ltd, Nabloom Technologies Pvt Ltd and Pinprint Technologies Pvt Ltd were used to make transactions in crores, many of them in bitcoins.
