OTP sharing scam case: Odisha STF arrests another accused

Bhubaneswar, June 8 (IANS) The Special Task Force (STF) of Odisha Police has arrested one more person in the OTP selling and sharing scam, a police official said on Thursday.

Earlier, three cyber criminals were arrested for sharing OTP of pre-activated SIMs to some criminals and suspected Pakistani agents. They were identified as Pathani Samant Lenka (35), Saroj Kumar Nayak alias (26) and Soumya Pattanaik (19).

The present accused is identified as Pradyumna Kumar Sahoo (32) of Nayagarh district. He is a graduate and had earlier worked as a territory sales executive in Idea and as Jio Point manager. Now he is working at Black buck, Fastag Company, the official said.

According to the STF, Pradyumna had sold more than 500 pre-activated SIMs and 150+ preactivated Paytm Wallets to Pathani Samanta Lenka, who was arrested earlier in this case. These SIMs and Wallets were sold to various cyber criminals and PIO (Pakistani Intelligence Operatives).

Some of the pre-activated SIMs and wallets were used by PIOs/ISI agents who are located inside Pakistan mainly from Karachi and Balochistan. Further investigation in this regard is going on, the STF official said.

During investigation, the task force officials found that the accused used to generate multiple SIMs on the same identity by fooling the unsuspecting customers on the pretext of some technical glitches.

For activation of different wallets, i.e., PhonePe, Google Pay and others, the registered mobile phone numbers (which are linked with the bank account) were mandatory.

However, in the case of a Paytm wallet account, once activated, others along with the main customer can also operate it after using the user id and password. The STF is going to analyze this and if needed, will write to Paytm to change the settings, the official informed.

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