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New Delhi: The Railway Protection Force (RPF) here on Tuesday claimed to have unearthed a ticketing scam with links to money laundering and terror funding. Addressing the media, Arun Kumar, RPF Director-General, said, “After we launched the Operation Thunderstorm last year against ticket touts, a name — Ghulam Mustafa — kept on appearing on our radar.”
Mustafa was arrested from Bhubaneswar earlier this year, and the RPF recovered from him two laptops with software named ANMS. “Through this software, he bypassed the barriers set up to curb illegal ticketing, like providing captcha and bank OTPs,” Kumar said.
The scamsters then converted the collected money to cryptocurrency and sent that abroad through the shadow net, which was allegedly used in “terror funding, money laundering, and others,” he said.
“We have identified a person named Hamid Ashraf, based in Dubai, and suspected him to be the mastermind of the racket,” Kumar said.
Ashraf, the DG said, was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Railway Vigilance and the local police in 2016 from Basti in UP. But after getting bail, he escaped to Dubai via Nepal.
During Mustafa’s interrogation by the NIA, the Karnataka Police and the Intelligence Bureau, it was found that he was using the Darknet to convert the money to cryptocurrency and for money laundering.
Mustafa also used 563 personal IRCTC IDs to book confirmed tickets through ANMS software and around 3,000 bank accounts.
“The decryption of his laptop revealed that he was a follower of the Pakistan-based Tableek-e-Jamaat and had many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Gulf countries, Indonesian and Nepali numbers. He also had software to create fake Aadhaar and PAN cards,” the DG said. A number of Pakistani software and several highly encrypted messages were found on his laptop. (IANS)