Pune Police have arrested 152 people and registered cases against 132 mule bank account holders under a sustained campaign named Operation Mule Hunt, marking one of the city’s most extensive efforts yet to dismantle the banking infrastructure that keeps India’s cyber fraud economy running. Conducted jointly with Maharashtra Cyber, the operation targets not the fraudsters who script the scams but the accounts that quietly absorb and move the stolen money afterward. With 1,705 interstate notices under investigation and 2,099 notices issued to mule account holders in other states, the campaign reflects how deeply this financial layer now stretches across state lines.
Targeting the Accounts That Keep Cyber Fraud Moving
The logic behind Operation Mule Hunt rests on a simple observation that has come to dominate India’s cybercrime enforcement strategy. Catching the person who makes the fraudulent call or sends the phishing link matters little if the money they steal can still disappear into an untraceable maze of bank accounts within minutes.
Police officials said cyber fraud groups routinely use fake investment schemes, digital arrest scams, online loan frauds and bogus customer care operations to extract money, but nearly all of them depend on the same final step, funnelling proceeds through accounts that do not belong to the fraudsters themselves. Mule accounts, in other words, are the connective tissue of the entire fraud economy.
Arrests under the operation have come from Pune, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar and several locations beyond Maharashtra, and police have already filed charge sheets in multiple cases. Investigators are combing through bank transactions, mobile call records and digital payment trails to map the fuller structure of the networks these accounts feed into.
A Problem That Has Outgrown State Boundaries
The scale of interstate coordination built into this campaign, nearly 3,800 notices moving in both directions through the Coordination Portal, points to how far mule networks have spread beyond any single jurisdiction’s reach. This is not unique to Pune. Central databases have flagged the scale of the challenge nationally: the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre had flagged more than 2.47 million Layer-1 mule accounts nationwide as of early 2026, while a Lok Sabha reply disclosed that the Ministry of Home Affairs had identified and shared details of 27.37 lakh Layer-1 mule accounts through its Suspect Registry, helping prevent transactions worth more than ₹9,518 crore.
Industry data suggests the problem is also evolving. A recent fraud trends report noted a shift toward India-based mule accounts as crackdowns on scam centres in Southeast Asia push fraudsters to rely more heavily on local cash-out networks rather than routing money overseas. That shift raises the stakes for domestic policing efforts like Pune’s, since the money now increasingly stays, and can potentially be intercepted, within Indian banking rails rather than vanishing abroad.
Recruitment into mule networks typically follows a familiar pattern. According to regulatory guidance, individuals are lured through spam emails, social media platforms, recruitment websites, messaging applications and even newspaper advertisements, most commonly through platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook, where they are promised easy commissions in exchange for allowing transactions to pass through their accounts. Pune Police have stressed that ignorance of the source of these funds offers no legal shield, warning that account holders who knowingly assist fraudsters can themselves be prosecuted as co-accused.
Awareness Campaigns Run Alongside Enforcement
Alongside enforcement, Pune Police have leaned heavily into public education as a parallel strategy. Officials said the force conducted 1,142 cyber awareness programmes across the city through 2026, reaching close to three lakh people with guidance on digital safety and fraud prevention. The Campus Connect Safe Horizon initiative extends this outreach into schools, colleges, IT companies, housing societies and government offices, aiming to reach potential mule recruits before criminal networks do.
Police have reiterated a now-familiar set of precautions, urging citizens never to share bank account details, ATM cards, cheque books, net banking credentials, OTPs, Aadhaar or PAN information with unknown persons, and to report anyone suspected of assisting cybercriminals to the nearest police station or cybercrime unit.
Cybercrime experts tracking these efforts note that arrests alone rarely dent the underlying economics of online fraud, since new mule accounts can be recruited almost as quickly as old ones are frozen. Disrupting the financial channels that let stolen money move and settle is increasingly viewed as the more durable intervention, one that campaigns like Operation Mule Hunt are attempting to institutionalise rather than treat as a one-off enforcement drive.
