3 held for duping DTH service provider in Mumbai of ₹84 lakh

The city police have arrested three distributors of a DTH (direct to home) service provider for allegedly duping the service provider to the tune of Rs84lakh.

The accused are authorised DTH distributors who allegedly misused a technical glitch in the DTH provider’s system and managed to dupe the service provider. The accused have been identified as Shammikumar Arora, 29, Gurprit Khera, 28 and Manprit Khera, 24. They all run a DTH distribution centre in Haryana.

According to the police, the complainant in the case is the general manager of the DTH service provider. The company has fixed distributors with who the company signs an agreement and provides them login IDs to access its electronic voucher distribution system. After a distributor makes a payment to the company, the company sends him voucher distribution data. Later, the distributors sell this data to the dealers, who in turn sell it to customers to recharge their DTH accounts.

If some data is unsold then the system has a facility of returning it. The dealer returns unsold vouchers to the distributor and gets refund against the same.

Police said that normally, a voucher that has already been returned after failing to be sold cannot be returned again. However, the accused made use of a glitch in the DTH provider’s system that allowed this to happen, police said.

“In this case, the accused distributor created nearly 100 fictitious dealers with fake names and addresses and returned the unsold vouchers twice and sometimes thrice. The accused later also sold these unsold data vouchers at almost half the rates to genuine dealers and pocketed the money. In all, he duped the service provider of Rs83.99 lakh,” said an officer from the NM Joshi Marg police station.

When the company detected the fraud they lodged a complaint with the NM Joshi Marg police station last year. Police studied the technical aspect of the fraud and zeroed in on some suspects. They recently arrested the accused.

Virendra Mishara, deputy commissioner of police, zone 3 , confirmed the development and said that investigation is on.

The accused have been booked under sections 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code and 43 (damage to computer or computer system), 65 (tampering with computer source documents) and 66 (dishonestly or fraudulently, does any act referred to in section 43) of Information and Technology Act.

They have been remanded in police custody up to April 7 by a local court, the officer said.