OMG! Bank Accounts for hire

September 29, 2015 Incredible India Valli Sarvani No comments

Recently the hawala bust in West Bengal has caused quite a stir. When the investigation was conducted on the money generated through lottery scam, it was found that the racketeers were operating through 163 bank accounts!

The more surprising fact is that these bank accounts were taken on hire by the lottery kingpins. It was found that all the 163 different bank accounts which were operated in order to first park the money and then launder it in phases were hired from persons who charged the kingpins a certain amount of money for it.

The investigation found that people who let their accounts to be hired were charging a monthly rent in order to let the kingpins use the accounts. The highest number of bank accounts on hire was in Kerala followed by Odisha.

A series of raids were conducted last week by the Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate in West Bengal. The raids resulted in finding Rs.70 crore in cash. This cash was set to go out of the country through a hawala channel and they were even packed in gunny.

The lottery scam kingpin hired all these accounts in order to do the lottery scam. It was being run from Tamil Nadu according to the investigation. The main operative behind this was found to be Santiago Martin.

81 of these accounts were being operated from Kerala, 28 were from Tamil Nadu, 46 accounts were hired from Odisha, 18 in Andhra Pradesh, and 8 in Karnataka. It seems that there was no particular pattern followed when opening the bank accounts.

The plan was that once the money was withdrawn from the accounts, it would be packed up in gunny sacks and sent to West Bengal. The lottery kingpins would store it stored in go-downs operated by them.

After that, the money would be transferred to various countries through hawala channels. In order to maintain their safety, the transactions of the money would not exceed Rs.1 crore.

Foto di mohamed Hassan da Pixabay (Free for Commercial Use)