5 months ago
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Senior officials of the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Financial Services, and main vigilance officers of nationalist assemblage banks connected Monday (December 22, 2025) held a coordination gathering to reappraisal and expedite slope fraud investigations.
The meeting, held successful Chennai, focused connected pending cases being probed by the CBI and ways to fortify inter-departmental coordination. The misuse of mule slope accounts successful cyber frauds and steps to curb specified practices were besides discussed.
The discussions followed the CBI’s Operation Chakra V successful June 2025, during which searches linked to astir 8.5 lakh mule slope accounts were conducted crossed much than 700 slope branches nationwide. The operation, aimed astatine tackling cybercrime and alleged integer apprehension scams, led to searches astatine 42 locations successful 5 States and the apprehension of 9 accused.
According to the agency, organised cybercriminal networks were utilizing the mule accounts for integer apprehension scams, impersonation frauds, fraudulent advertisements, concern scams, and UPI-based frauds.
The CBI said definite slope officials, agents, aggregators, slope correspondents, middlemen, and e-Mitras facilitated the opening and cognition of these accounts done acts of committee and omission.
The bureau recovered that galore accounts were opened without due adherence to KYC norms, lawsuit owed diligence, oregon archetypal hazard assessment. In immoderate cases, subdivision managers failed to transportation retired enhanced owed diligence contempt system-generated suspicious transaction alerts. Some banks besides did not nonstop acknowledgment oregon thank-you letters to verify lawsuit addresses.
Those arrested included middlemen, agents, aggregators, relationship holders, and slope correspondents. During the aforesaid month, the CBI besides arrested a Mumbai-based idiosyncratic accused of supplying pre-activated SIM cards and mule slope accounts to cybercriminal networks.
At Monday’s meeting, elder CBI officials and representatives of nationalist assemblage banks made elaborate presentations highlighting operational challenges. Case-specific issues were discussed, and steps were agreed upon to velocity up investigations and prosecutions.
Efforts were besides made to streamline procedures for obtaining anterior approvals and prosecution sanctions nether the Prevention of Corruption Act. The CBI said respective pending issues with banks were resolved, and participants agreed to support structured engagement to flooded procedural bottlenecks and reenforce organization coordination.
