A single complaint over ₹1.50 lakh in unauthorised bank transactions has led police in Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli district to a seven-member gang accused of running a money mule operation, offering a close-up view of how India’s cyber fraud economy increasingly runs not through hackers, but through borrowed bank accounts.
A joint team from the local police, the Cyber Police Station and the Special Operations Group arrested seven men after a resident alleged that an acquaintance had persuaded him to lend his bank account for what was described as a legitimate business venture. He was asked to hand over his passbook, ATM card and the SIM linked to the account, on the assurance that it would only receive genuine commercial payments.
From a Favour to a Fraud
The account, instead, began processing transactions the victim had never authorised, eventually totalling nearly ₹1.50 lakh. When he confronted the accused, he was allegedly abused and threatened, which pushed him to approach the police rather than stay quiet, a decision that ultimately exposed a far larger operation than his own loss suggested.
Acting on technical surveillance, police raided a location near Uframau village and arrested Sameer Valmiki, Shivank Mishra alias Shiva, Ritik Kumar, Lucky Singh, Ranvijay Singh, Vaibhav Srivastava alias Sunny and Abhishek. The recoveries told their own story: seven forged Aadhaar cards, ten mobile phones, ten ATM cards, four passbooks, two cheque books and ₹14,100 in cash, the working inventory of a mule account supply chain rather than a one-off scam.
Recruiting the Financially Unaware
Investigators say the gang’s method leaned less on technical sophistication than on persuasion, deliberately targeting people with limited financial literacy. Promises of online gaming income, easy business earnings or legitimate side income were used to convince individuals to part with their bank accounts, ATM cards, Aadhaar details and registered mobile numbers, the exact instruments needed to open and operate an account without ever appearing on paper as its true user.
Once handed over, these accounts became conduits for layering stolen money, receiving proceeds from cyber fraud elsewhere in the country and rapidly moving funds onward to obscure their origin before banks or investigators could catch up. Police say some of those arrested already carried previous criminal records, and are now examining call records, SIM usage and financial transactions to determine whether the Rae Bareli network fed into a larger, multi-state mule operation.
Part of a Nationwide Pattern
The case is far from isolated. Uttar Pradesh alone has seen a string of similar busts in recent months, from a Varanasi-Bhadohi network that used fake welfare-scheme promises to open over 200 mule accounts, to a Siddharthnagar college student whose six accounts were traced to ₹22.55 crore in fraud complaints across multiple states, to a Gonda operation that froze nearly ₹14.87 crore linked to a nine-state mule network. Nationally, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre had already flagged more than 24.7 lakh Layer-1 mule accounts by early 2026, a scale that dwarfs any single police station’s caseload.
Prof. Triveni Singh, the cybercrime expert and former IPS officer, said mule accounts have effectively become the connective tissue of organised cybercrime, letting fraudsters distance themselves from stolen money while complicating financial investigations. He cautioned that handing over a bank account, ATM card, passbook, cheque book or registered SIM to anyone, regardless of how the offer is framed, carries real legal risk, since account holders who knowingly or unknowingly allow their accounts to be used this way can themselves face scrutiny once investigators start tracing the money trail.
