Police arrest four in CIBIL score fraud

For the first time, the Gujarat Police have busted a cyber fraud in which the accused defrauded people by citing poor CIBIL score. Police have arrested four people from Anand in this case.
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Interestingly, the arrests took place without any complaints. The police had been informed of the fraud, had identified the suspect and followed his bank account to find out the other accounts from which the money was deposited into that of the accused.

For the uninitiated, a CIBIL score is a score that assesses the creditworthiness of a loan applicant. The higher the score (closer to 900), the better the creditworthiness and the better the chances of getting a loan. Those arrested were identified as Vishal Vankar, Harshit Solanki, Viral Christie and Parth Gohel, all residents of Anand. Interestingly, all four are unemployed. Vi-ral worked in HDB Finance's loan department while Vishal worked at MAS Finance, but both had lost their jobs. Parth, who worked in Amul, and Harshit had also lost their jobs.

Police sources said the accused told cops that they were involved in the CIBIL Score fraud for the last four months, but cops suspect they were in it for longer, given the number of victims that they deceived. Police said this was a first-of-its-kind case in which the scammers duped the victims by promising to ignore their low CIBIL score or scare them with a CIBIL score.

Inspector DR Gohil of Anand told Mirror that they had come across cases of loan fraud under cybercrime but the one in which CIBIL score was used was a first.

“So far, we have traced 50 victims who were cheated out of thousands of rupees.

The problem is that once we track down the victims and call them, they think we are trying to scam them again and so most do not answer our calls. We have formed a team to personally visit the victims as this is a state-wide scam with victims in Ahmedabad, Vadodara and other cities and districts,” Gohil said.

A “simple” procedure
The scammers ran ads on Facebook and other social networks, offering loans. Those who needed loans called the given number and the fraudsters took their details. Then Vishal, posing as a manager, would tell them that they have low CIBIL scores and hence they will have to pay to get the loan.

​​​​​​​They then forced the loan applicant to transfer money under various pretexts. They would later say the loan was approved, but because their server was down, they were unable to distribute the loan before blocking the customer's phone number.