Bengaluru cyber centre owner forges Aadhaar cards to help clients get old-age pensions

The Central Crime Branch (CCB) Monday arrested a cyber centre owner in Bengaluru who was into changing the date of birth in the Aadhar cards of youths so as to make them eligible for government schemes, including old age pension, the police said.

During the raid, the police seized a laptop, six computers, hard disks, four mobile phones, and 205 old age pension applications and other documents. The police have identified the arrested as K S Chathur, a resident of Rajajinagar.

Joint Commissioner of Police (crime) SD Sharanappa said that Chathur edited the Aadhaar cards of people aged between 38 and 43 years and changed their date of births so as to make them eligible for the old-age pensions of senior citizens and levied a fee in the range of Rs 3,000 to Rs 5,000.

— source | 21-03-2023

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UIDAI suspends 1.2% of total Aadhaar operators for attempting fraud

The Unique Identification Authority of India has suspended 1.2 per cent of Aadhar operators in the last year for attempting fraudulent activities, an official statement said on Tuesday.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is estimated to have 99,000-1 lakh operators who enrol individuals as well as provide other Aadhaar services like name correction, address change etc.

“About 1.2 per cent of total operators have been suspended in the last one year, due to attempted fraudulent activities. Necessary penal action is taken in such cases,” UIDAI said in a statement.

In a security update of the Aadhaar system, the UIDAI said that it has restricted the number of enrolments per day per machine.

“To discourage mischievous operators from misusing the system, GPS fencing has been embedded in the Enrolment machines. An operator is required to verify the credentials of the

— source business-standard.com | Mar 21, 2023

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Corporate social responsibility is a sham

robert reich

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The case about Deceiving & Cheating Tenants in Baltimore’s “Kushnerville”

A property management company partly owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has agreed to pay $3.25 million to the state of Maryland and to reimburse tens of thousands of tenants in Baltimore. Maryland’s Attorney General Brian Frosh said, “This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated tenants and subjected them to miserable living conditions.” The state of Maryland sued the Kushner-owned company after ProPublica detailed how the company hounded low-income tenants with a barrage of lawsuits, eviction notices and late fees, even when the tenants were in the right.

This is really big settlement. It’s really hard to find precedent for a settlement this big in a case like this — more than $3 million, as you said. Residents are going to be able to file claims for rent that they had to pay on these incredibly shoddy units. I was in units back in 2017 that had holes in the wall, that had leaks all over the place, that were riddled with mice. One woman had raw sewage coming out of her kitchen sink. She had maggots coming out of her carpet, appliances not working, gas leaks — just these endless problems that tenants had to deal with, and they were still having to, of course, pay their rent and being constantly taken to court by the Kushners.

What my article described was just this constant hounding of tenants for alleged missing rent and broken leases, where they would just, for years and years and years, go after

— source democracynow.org | Sep 27, 2022

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Cyber criminals misusing Aadhaar cards of labourers

Aadhaar cards of Nepalese have been misused by cyber criminals in five to 10 per cent of the cyber frauds in the past two years. Investigations of cyber crime cases revealed that the miscreants used Aadhaar cards of Nepalese and labourers from Bihar and Jharkhand to procure SIMs and create online bank accounts by submitting their (Know Your Client) KYC details which were used to dupe people.

As many as 12,665 cyber complaints were received in the past two years (2020 and 2021) and 320 FIRs were registered.

About 50 per cent of the complaints pertain to financial frauds, 30-35 per cent to social networks and rest are miscellaneous.

In a new trend, fraudsters are targeting hoteliers, shopkeepers and coaching centres. Details of Facebook pages of hotels in Himachal are changed to take advance money from customers making advance bookings.

Cyber criminals are also calling coaching centres, pretending to get admission, and shopkeepers for home delivery of items. They ask for account details on the pretext of

— source tribuneindia.com | Jun 09, 2022

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Gujarat-Based ABG Shipyard ‘Defrauded’ 28 Banks of Rs 22,842 Cr

In the biggest bank fraud in the past 75 years, totalling Rs 22,842 crore in India, public sector State Bank of India (SBI) has refuted allegations of delay in filing the complaint against Gujarat-based ABG Shipyard with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The CBI had filed a case against ABG Shipyard, the flagship company of the ABG Group which builds and repairs ships in Dahej and Surat, and its directors Rishi Agarwal, Santhanam Muthuswamy and Ashwini Kumar on Saturday for allegedly defrauding 28 banks of Rs 22,842 crore.

In a statement issued on Sunday, SBI said that it had filed a complaint against ABG Shipyard with the CBI way back on November 8, 2019. on March 12, 2020, the bank filed a second complaint in August that year. According to the CBI, the agency acted on the complaint after “scrutinising” it for more than one-and-a-half years by filing an FIR on February 7. SBI issued the statement after All India Congress Committee general secretary Randeep Surjewala accused the Narendra Modi government of running a “loot and escape” flagship scheme for bank fraudsters.

SBI said that after the company was “financed under consortium arrangement with over two dozen lenders led by ICICI Bank”, the “account became a non-performing asset (NPA) in November 2013 due to poor performance”. As per the country’s largest public-sector lender, the “account was classified as NPA in July 2016 with effect from November 2013” as restructuring failed.

— source newsclick.in | 14 Feb 2022

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Ration racket: 1,100 fingerprint casts found

In their investigation into stealing of food grains from the public distribution system by fair price shop owners, the cybercrime cell of Ahmedabad police has found more than 1,100 casts of beneficiary fingerprints made on some silicone-like material. The modus operandi used by the racketeers is shocking as a fingerprint cast can be used to endorse any document, open locked apps and mobile phones and bypass bio-metric barriers that depend solely on fingerprints.

In pursuit of the trail they have been following since December 2019, police have till date arrested 40 persons, with the last six arrested since Monday, January 3, said Rajdeepsinh Zala, DCP, cybercell. The mastermind behind the racket, Bharat Chaudhary of Banaskantha, had been arrested last December.

Sources said Chaudhary and his gang held soft copies and associated data of nearly 2,500 fingerprints.

Corrupted fair price shop owners used to provide the fingerprints and data to Chaudhary, who used to take Rs 1,000 to prepare each fingerprint cast from scans. The fingerprint casts were then used to imprint fingerprints of poor people and siphon off their ration from the public distribution system. The food grains and other material were then sold in

— source timesofindia.indiatimes.com | Sarfaraz Shaikh | Feb 6, 2020

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Journalists Investigating Financial Crimes Threatened by Global Elites

In November 2020 the Foreign Policy Centre (FPC) released “Unsafe for Scrutiny,” a report about the threats faced by journalists investigating the financial misconduct that lets ‘dirty money’ flow through the world’s most powerful banks. As Spencer Woodman detailed in an article for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the report reveals that global elites have been abusing their intimidating legal and financial powers by targeting reporters with defamation lawsuits, “cease and desist” letters, social media smear campaigns, trolling, verbal harassment, and even occasionally physical violence. Yet, as Woodman underscored, the report concluded that legal threats “are chief among the types of harassment facing journalists conducting financial investigations.” The harassment faced by investigative journalists looking into financial crimes has a chilling effect on reporting about corruption and, ultimately, infringes the public’s right to know about the money laundering, bribery, theft of public funds, and other illicit acts carried out (or facilitated) by wealthy banks, government officials, and corporate leaders.

Sponsored in part by the Justice for Journalists Foundation, the FPC’s study was based on a survey of investigative reporters from all around the world, many of whom had worked on cross-border financial crime investigations such as the multi-year investigations into the financial records leaked in the Panama Papers or the FinCEN Files. Responses from 63 investigative journalists working in 41 countries indicated that a vast majority had faced threats and harassment during their investigations into financial crimes. Susan Coughtrie, project director at the Foreign Policy Centre, told Woodman that the large-scale transnational investigations conducted by these reporters exposed “explosive insights into how political and business elites, as well as organised crime groups, all over the world get away with financial crime and corruption.”

The report found that wealthy individuals and corporations involved in financial corruption often resort to legal action against underfunded investigative journalists as a tactic to thwart their research into corruption. These frivolous suits, known as “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” or SLAPPs, are said to “create a similar chilling

— source projectcensored.org | | Nov 9, 2021

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Man in Jind, fingerprint used in Delhi, Bihar to withdraw money

On November 14, 2018, 40-year-old Vikram got a message that Rs 1,000 had been withdrawn from his Punjab National Bank account from an SBI micro ATM in Delhi using biometric (fingerprint) verification. At that time he was in Jind taking care of his younger daughter who had been admitted to a private hospital.

The message baffled him even more as he earned his livelihood generating Aadhaar IDs for people in his village and thus knew the improbability of such a transaction.

On November 20, someone again withdrew Rs 7,500 from his HDFC account using his fingerprints at a micro ATM in Madhubani, Bihar. He wondered if someone had somehow managed to obtain his fingerprints and make a silicon copy of it as he had heard of some students doing so to send imposters in their place to take entrance tests where biometrics were used.

— source timesofindia.indiatimes.com | Jan 29, 2019

After this, Vikram complained to the officials and got his biometrics locked.

Almost $500bn ‘lost to tax abuse by firms and super-rich in 2021’

Countries are losing almost half a trillion dollars through tax abuse by multinationals and the super-rich, enough to fully vaccinate the global population against Covid-19 three times over, a report has said.

Research by tax campaigners found that estimated losses had risen from $427bn last year to $483bn (£359bn) in 2021, with the UK alone responsible for almost 40% of the total.

Britain facilitates abuse and evasion through a network made up of British overseas territories and the City of London, the report said.

The State of Tax Justice 2021 – jointly published by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), the Global Alliance for Tax Justice and the global union federation Public Services International – said $312bn of the total sum was the result of cross-border corporate tax abuse by multinational corporations and $171bn offshore tax evasion by wealthy individuals.

The report said the total was calculated based on data self-reported by multinational

— source theguardian.com | Larry Elliott | 16 Nov 2021

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