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The bank accounts of the accused people were frozen during the two-day-long search proceedings on Monday and Tuesday at 16 locations in Bengaluru, an ED spokesperson said.
The official said the searches were conducted under the provisions of Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) at the residential premises of the accused and also on the offices of payment gateways, including PhonePe, Paytm, Google Pay and Amazon Pay, and banks like HDFC, ICICI and Dhanalakshmi.
The ED initiated the money laundering investigation on the basis of an FIR registered on March 3 last year by South Cyber Economics and Narcotic Crimes Police Station against ‘Messrs Super Like Online Earning Application’ and other accused.
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Giving details of the case, the spokesperson said customers of the application had to invest some money and share photos and videos of celebrities. They would then get money back as profits.
”By getting attracted towards this lucrative scheme, the common public invested funds in the app. After sharing videos of celebrities, they got some money as profits for some time,” the ED said.
However, later on, the customers did not get any returns even after sharing videos and photos. When they tried to witdraw their invested money, the app had blocked their amount, the spokesperson said.
”Thus, by cheating the common public, the accused people collected huge amounts of funds from the common public and did not return their money. Criminal activities related to scheduled offences were committed,” the spokesperson said.
The ED said further investigation in the case is under progress.