The Surat City Cyber Crime Cell has arrested a 27-year-old man from Porbandar who, police allege, supplied rented bank accounts to an international cyber fraud network run from Dubai. Investigators say a phone seized from him held details of 79 accounts, and that complaints linked to those accounts on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal add up to about Rs 11.03 crore. A court has remanded him to six days of police custody, IANS reported.
Police identified the accused as Divyesh alias Bapu alias Divlo Meghnathi. Sandesh described him as a main accused in the network and said police plan to use the custody period to trace the Dubai-based handler and other members. He has not been tried, and the allegations remain unproven.
How the money allegedly moved
According to the police account carried by both outlets, the accused collected accounts from people who are now absconding, paid them a commission, and passed the login and banking details to an associate in Dubai. Fraud victims then sent money into those accounts. IANS reported that the 53 linked complaints came from 18 states and Union Territories, and that some of the money traced back to fraud involving Chinese nationals.
Police allege the group withdrew the money through ATMs and cheques, kept 13 per cent as its cut, and used the rest to buy USDT, a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, from various sellers. The Dubai associate then told them which crypto wallets to send it to. Part of the proceeds allegedly went into a gold ring.
The Rs 11.03 crore figure is the total claimed in complaints against these accounts. It is the scale of reported fraud passing through the network, and police have not said how much of it they have frozen or recovered.
Why a Porbandar arrest matters to Surat investigators
Large cyber frauds need ordinary bank accounts in ordinary names. A scammer sitting abroad cannot easily open an Indian savings account, so networks pay local middlemen to recruit account holders. Each account that gets reported and frozen has to be replaced, which keeps the middlemen busy and gives police a point where the chain touches Indian soil.
Surat police have followed this trail before. In February 2025, DeshGujarat reported the arrest of a Surat man for sending bank kits to a Dubai-based cyber crime racket. The Porbandar case has a similar shape, with the alleged recruiter in a Saurashtra town and the controller outside Indian jurisdiction.
What it means for account holders in Gujarat
Surat police used the arrest to repeat a warning. Anyone who lends, rents or sells a bank account in return for a commission can face legal action over the transactions that pass through it. Offers to “park” money, earn a fee for a dormant account, or hand over a debit card and SIM for a few thousand rupees all fit this description.
When a victim complains, banks can freeze the receiving account, and police start with the name on it. A student or daily-wage worker who sold an account months earlier can end up answering for crores routed through it.
For people who lose money to online fraud, police advise calling the national cyber crime helpline 1930 at once. The faster a complaint reaches the system, the better the chance of freezing funds before the network withdraws them or converts them to crypto.
What to watch
The six-day remand gives investigators time to question the accused about the people who supplied the 79 accounts and about the Dubai contact. Watch for further arrests of account suppliers in Gujarat, for any figure on funds frozen or recovered, and for whether police link this network to cases in the 18 states and UTs where complaints were filed.
Sources: IANS via SocialNews, Sandesh, DeshGujarat
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.